TNAG-0975-FCO40-1194-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-in-other--1980 — Page 9

IB 581/2 IV

MISS S. HORLINGTON,

British Embassy Britannia House rue Joseph II 28

1040 Brussels

Belgium

:

?

22nd October 1980

I am writing to you as Secretary to the Executive Committee of the Hong Kong Community Council for the Resettlement of Vietnamese Refugees. This body consists, as you may know, of Government officials and representatives from the leading voluntary agencies working with refugees here, including Dr Karl Stumpf and Miss Dorothy Lee. In the spring of this year we prepared a questionnaire to be filled in by refugees now resettled in overseas countries, who had previously been in camps in Hong Kong. The main aim of the questionnaire was to give us further information on problems experienced by the refugees on resettlement and what more we might accordingly do to prepare them here. copy is enclosed for your information.

We had printed some 10,000 questionnaires in all. Copies were sent to contacts in voluntary agencies in all the leading countries of resettlement. We asked them to arrange for the questionnaires to be filled in by refugees and then returned to a box office address in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, owing to Government financial constraints, we were unable to pay for the postage of the returned questionnaires! It is, we believe, primarily for this reason that the response from all countries except the United Kingdom has so far been disappointing. Only in the United Kingdom, where we have been able through the Hong Kong Government Office in London to make contact with the voluntary agencies and encourage them to get the questionnaires completed, have we had more than a 50% return. Moreover the London Office was able to sand back to us the completed questionnaires in the regular courier service.

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