CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
Telephone 01- 233 5073
Пла
Cla 17μ
Се
189
Your reference
Our reference
PL Bean Esq BANGKOK
HIK 243/3 RECEIVED IN REĢISTRY
Date
13 November 1986
- 2 DEC 1986
INDE..
İCER
PA
Action Taken
Гутек а
}
Vietnamese
"monal" or Swift/ french
"normal"?
Dear Peter,
VISIT OF UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES
1. I am conscious of never having replied to your interesting letter of 15 September reporting the visit to Thailand of Monsieur Hocké. I have been holding off mainly to take stock of many other developments on regional refugee issues and also to await full details of M Hocké's recent visit to the UK. You will already have seen FCO telno 2425 to Hong Kong which we repeated to you under cover of our telno 189 to Hanoi. You should by now have seen also the record of M Hocké's meeting with UN Department. We shall ensure that other records of his meetings are copied to you in due course. I fear that we are still some way from a considered view of the outcome of M Hocké's visit, but I shall attempt to follow up one or two points from your letter in the light of my own impressions of M Hocké's visit here.
2. As in Thailand, M Hocké gave much emphasis here to repatration as the best and most practicable long-term solution for Indo-Chinese refugees. Resettlement places were drying up; the countries of first asylum showed no greater willingness than before to accept refugees for local integration; this left only eventual return to the countries of origin which, in any case, should always be considered the most satisfactory durable solution. The problem, of course, was that conditions must be right for the refugees to return in safety and with a guaranteed chance to live a "normal" life where they wished. M Hocké described a long-term process of establishing a momentum of return for the Indo-Chinese refugees to their countries of origin.
He saw Laos as the most obvious place to start (indeed, the voluntary repatration programme and the screening programme were already showing the way); Cambodia would be next, with the focus on the elderly Cambodians who had expressed a wish to return to their country to die; once the momentum was established and should conditions change sufficiently to allow it, the natural
repatriation of Vietnamese could then follow.
RC4 ABF
CONFIDENTIAL
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