HKK 243/3
GISTRY
1 SEP 1986
3/3
147
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
RECENC
London SW1A 2AH
DUS
Telephone 01-233 4489
✓ me
J G H Dickinson Esq Sec (0) (c)
Room 5314
Ministry of Defence
Main Building WHITEHALL
Do In Dickien
Your reference D/Sec (0) (0)6/7
Our reference
SJAAFJ
Date
27 August 1986
TREATMENT OF VIETNAMESE REFUGEES AT BMH HONG KONG
1. Thank you for your letter of 21 August, which raises several little mysteries. Briefly they are as follows:
(a) all refugees "on the islands" are detained in "closed camps": no on e leaves a camp without HKG permission (there is a head-count every day). So either the BMH doctors are taking people out of the camps for reasons other than those they are giving HKG for doing so; or HKG already know what is happening because BMH are in fact telling them. (Another possibility (which I am discounting) is that the visitors to BMH are refugees from the older urban camps, which are "open" and in which residents are free to come and go more or less as they wish.)
(b) So far as
treatment
we are aware, all medical in the closed centres is provided by HKG doctors who staff the clinics in each camp. Where necessary, referrals are made (under escort) to outside HKG hospitals. So either visiting BMH doctors are supplementing this service with HKG knowledge, or are entering in another capacity (eg as private visitors, or as dentists or other doctors for whom separate arrangements are periodically made by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees).
(2. I should at this point add that there are also some points in the letter you enclose from Mr Ash, Med F & S, which do not reflect HKG policy accurately and should not, I suggest, be repeated in any direct approach to HKG: specifically the second and third sentences of para 4(b) of Mr Ash's letter. Certainly HKG would consider that they provide a good deal more than "minimum support" (see in this connection my para 1(b) above).)
J.
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