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protect them and help them to a durable solution. If people are economic migrants or migrants of other categories, well, they are outside my competence. If a country would like to
clarify what is what, well, that is within the decisions of
that government or that sovereignty.
We have tried in many
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cases to do so but also we have in many cases had to, according to the practical realities, to save people coming we accept them prima facie as refugees, for one reason especially if they cannot go back in safety, then you might say being outside they are in a refugee-like situation.
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AL PESSIN
VOICE OF AMERICA:
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Two questions if I may, Sir. First, in your discussions with
the Governor and the other Hong Kong officials, did you specifi-
cally ask them either to end the 'closed camp' policy and/or to
accept for resettlement at least the ethnic Chinese Vietnamese
refugees that are in Hong Kong. And secondly, you said the emphasis now is on the resettlement countries; what specifically are you doing, what pressures, if any, are you bringing to bear on the major resettlement countries to finish off the last
35,000 or so Vietnamese refugees?
MR. HARTLING:
The last question first, what arguments
I can help to bear upon the different governments, Well, first of all, humanitarian. Those people must be helped, here are
people living two
three
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four
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น.
even five years, in a camp
not only in Hong Kong but other places in the world and we ask
them to do something for these people out of humanitarian reasons.
How can decent countries afford to see human beings in such a
bad situation that they have no future to create their own lives? That is the same argument we use for all the refugees in the world, and perhaps I could put in parenthesis here, "there are more than ten million refugees;" if you add the Palestinians outside my competence you might come to 12 million refugees in the world. So when we speak of Hong Kong we speak of one-tenth of a per-cent of the refugees in the world.
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