TNAG-1182-FCO40-1484-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-into-the--1982 — Page 110

I

布政司署

香港下亞畢道

* OUR Ref.:

(113) in CR 1/4821/82

* YOUR Ref.:

UN 243/5

CW Long Esq

United Kingdom Mission

37-39 rue de Vermont

1211 Geneva 20

SWITZERLAND

Dear forg

1

done

AR2911

Max pl. Do we have

Lomp's letter?

(14-8

Security Branch

GOVERNMENT SECRETARIAT

LOWER ALBERT ROAD HONG KONG

14th July 1982

Hkk. 243/

243/1

MDEX

No

CGE

22/7

// AFzh

Hong Kong: Vietnamese Refugees

Attached to

144

Your letter of the 2nd July addressed to the

South East Asian Department, copied to Richard Margolis here in Hong Kong, has come to me and as the Hong Kong Government Branch principally concerned with this subject, I thought you might like to hear about the latest change of policy straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

2.

Firstly, let me say that we keep in very close touch with Dolly Lasan of UNHCR here in Hong Kong and we each have a very close understanding of each other's position on refugee matters.

3.

She explained to me that she had to "go through the motions" of keeping the Protection Division informed of our changing attitude, although she perfectly under- stood our reasons for it.

4.

The last paragraph of the International Herald Tribune cutting accompanying your letter is by way of being journalistic licence I suspect. At any rate, the point I must make, in case this has not reached you in any of the other correspondence, is that in introducing closed camps in order to prevent refugees from working in Hong Kong we are simply bringing our policy into line with that of the other countries of first-asylum in the region.

5.

The problem is that we in Hong Kong are now paying the penalty for having adopted too humanitarian a stance in this affair. Resettlement countries have been more prepared to remove refugees from countries of first asylum where a fairly hard regimen is enforced for refugees than they have in Hong Kong. The result is that we now have the largest refugee population in the region, it is growing and, most important, half of them have been here for over three years!

/... 6.