TNAG-1533-FCO40-2097-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-refugees-closed-camp-policy-1986 — Page 34

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Would the Vietnamese refugees find such a project acceptable? A Philippine island

or a bit of Borneo is clearly less attractive than the welfare systems of Europe,

Australasia, or North America. When the Hong Kong government offered twenty re-

settlement places in Hong Kong each month to the people living in our open camps, only one third of the places were taken up. This shows that most economic refugees

would still like to gamble on the receding possibility of a place in the West. But

resettlement would clearly be preferable to life in a closed camp or to life in

Vietnam - for those free spirits who really cannot tolerate the local brand of

communism.

What are the chances of the Philippines or Indonesia agreeing to take these refugees?

Indonesia has a special Minister for Internal Resettlement, (mostly of Javanese going

to West Irian) - and the Indonesians' economy has suffered badly from the drop in the

price of oil. There are certainly parts of Borneo which could be made habitable with

proper funding, but the ethnic temper of the Indonesian government is always uncertain.

The Philippine people have a more tolerant tradition, and the idea of providing

assistance at a profit, to people who are both anti-communist and non-Moslem, could appeal to Mrs. Aquino's Western liberalism.

Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that the Philippines needs money, and with tactful

handling it is not impossible to imagine a Philippines government accepting such a

proposal. There would, of course, have to be safeguards built into the scheme, so

that the Philippines government (and the Indonesian governemnt) would be assured that

they wouldn't be left in the financial lurch, and in partnership with the UNHCR they

would have to have substantial control over their part of the project.

Would the Japanese actually put up the money? A number of British people who know the Japanese well think that they would. The whole concept would seem to fit in with present Japanese aid policies, and after Prime Minister Nakasone's recent remarks, many Japanese are particularly conscious that their record on the refugee front has been so dreadful that they have lost face. It would be pleasantly ironic if the Japanese, who have done so little in the first decade of the Vietnamese refugee problem,

should provide the financial answer in the second decade.

Anyhow, we cannot go much further down the road we are on at the moment.

Sir Philip Goodhart