TNAG-1540-FCO40-2104-Further-resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-i-1986 — Page 67

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Mr Fell

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Mr AdamRECEIVED IN REGISTRY

1 1 NOV 1986

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cc Mr Leeks, Hong Kong Dept

Mr Trevan, UN Dept

M G H Wood Esq, Hanoi D Wyatt Esq, Bangkok

MEETING WITH THE DIRECTOR OF THE BRITISH REFUGEE COUNCIL

1.

I had lunch on 15 October with Martin Barber, Director of the BRC. He has recently returned from the UNHCR Executive Committee meeting in Geneva and is now gearing up for the coming round of meetings with the Home Office, culminating in a meeting with Mr Waddington.

REFUGEES IN THAILAND

2. Mr Barber is well informed on Thai affairs, having served with UNHCR in Thailand for 3 years until 1981. He takes a fairly bleak view. He is convinced that the Thais will not revise their policy on local integration. He agrees that repatriation is not appropriate for the Khmers on the border and is fading as a solution for the other refugees in Thailand. He sees a solution as dependent upon movement towards a political settlement, but sees no serious prospect of this. He envisages also a scenario in which the CGDK will obtain control of a part of Cambodia, whereupon the Thais will pressure the Khmer displaced persons to return to the "liberated" areas of their country of origin. He believes the Thais are serious in their intention to close Khao-i-Dang, although he thinks that some at least of the Khmers housed there will be allowed to remain for the time being. He thought that the wish to increase the pressure on resettlement countries was only part of the Thai motive for the decision to close. Other possible motives would include the Thai preference for dealing with UNBRO rather than UNHCR; possible frictions between the various agencies, particularly the military, responsible for the various camps; and the greater problems of administering Khao-i-Dang compared to Site 2.

HONG KONG/SCORRI

3. Mr Barber, after a seemly delay, turned the conversation to Hong Kong. He expressed his astonishment at what was becoming apparent to him to be the Home Office view: that the response to SCORRI had offered a quota of 500 resettlement places from Hong Kong and a further 60 from camps elsewhere in Asia, and that this commitment had now been fulfilled. He argued that the wording of the reply can justify no such interpretation. The reply is rather a binding commitment to accept all those refugees to meet the extended criteria. The very minimal position, he argued, was that all those whose names had appeared in the original UNHCR list must be accepted for resettlement (many in fact still remain in Hong Kong). Mr Barber spoke of great incompetence in the implementation of the Government response to SCORRI. In particular, he could not understand why the Home Office had been accepting more distant relatives who do not qualify for resettlement even under the extended criteria, particularly if their intention was all the time to stop at a ceiling of some 500. The result was that priority cases appeared to have no hope of resettlement. The problem was compounded by the fact that

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