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Executive Committe meeting of water wirited ka muker
8.
The following is a resume of the various discussions I had :-
(a)
Vietnamese. The Vietnamese Vice Foreign Minister, Mr. Ha Van Lau, was in Geneva again this year mainly for bilateral meetings, generally about ODP, although there was one open general meeting at which mere sycophantic pleasantries were exchanged. The British Mission did not want a bilateral meeting with Mr. Ha this year. However, they agreed that I should meet him and arranged this for me through the UNHCR : they also knew informally what I was going to say to them. Having gone through the formalities I explained in some detail that we were now receiving many ethnic Vietnamese from the North who because they were untainted by the previous regime and had no relatives abroad were unlikely to be resettled. There was therefore a distinct possibility that some of them would in due course realise that they had been very misguided and want to go home. After an explanation of why people left Vietnam which ignored peasants from the North Mr. Ha said that the Vietnamese Government would of course as a humanitarian country have to consider sympathetically any such requests and that they should be forwarded to Hanoi with full details of previous and present personal circumstances. However the primary consideration would be state security i.e. whether or not they were previously connected with the Americans or the South Vietnamese Government.
This discussion aroused considerable interest and I was asked about it by the Deputy UNHCR, his staff, the Americans and the Australians. The latter incidentally had similar discussions which I understand concentrated on unaccompanied minors and elderly people.
CONFIDENTIAL
/ (b)
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