TNAG-1184-FCO40-1486-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-into-the--1982 — Page 15

GF 323

CONFIDENTIAL ##

Serial No: 4325

機密

3rd November 1982

Anti-Escape Measures in Vietnam

In the village of Thon Ke Song in Binh Tei Province political lectures given by village cadres are held once or twice a month. Normally only one adult from each family is required to attend, but in the middle of July 1982 persons aged 16 years and more were summoned to a special meeting which was to be addressed personally by the head of the village Public Security (PS) unit.

2.

During the meeting the Head of the PS unit told the villagers that new laws had been introduced to discourage clandestine departures from Vietnam. These laws were said to state that:

3.

4.

a.

b.

C.

all persons caught escaping (including women and children) would be sentenced to between five and ten years in a re-education camp;

all escapees' families would be sent to the New Economic Zones; and

persons concealing escape information would also be punished.

The Head of the PS unit went on to say that:

a.

b.

owing to recent disturbances between northerners and southerners in countries of first asylum, resettlement countries no longer accepted Vietnamese refugees; and Vietnamese were no longer welcome in Hong Kong, which had stopped accepting refugees on 2nd July 1982.

Throughout the meeting it was stressed that the Vietnamese people should put aside all thoughts of escape and direct their efforts towards building a better Vietnam.

50

A similar meeting took place in Thanh Loc Dang village, near Da Nang in late July 1982. This took the form of a routine village political meeting, addressed by a village cadre who told the villagers that clandestine departure from Vietnam was now pointless, as no resettle- ment country would accept them. He said that Thailand was negotiating with the United Nations for the repatriation of their Vietnamese refugees but that Vietnam would not take back such traitors, who would thus become stateless and be condemned to an indefinite period of harsh treatment in whatever country they happened to be. No mention of the Hong Kong closed camp policy was made at this meeting.

CONFIDENTIAL

機密

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