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visited one of the refugee camps along the Thai/Cambodia border and stated categorically that the return of the Pol Pot regime to power would be unacceptable. This may well have been a given of our policy hitherto, but it had never before been stated so clearly. It was a far cry from HMG's response to the Foreign Affairs Committee's report in 1987 and, I am sure, will have contributed to the easing of the Cambodian logjam. It certainly helped to ensure that the resolution on Cambodia at the UN General Assembly, while condemning the illegal occupation of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops, also recognised that the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s had been an affront to the civilised world and could not be allowed to return.
13. The Cambodian issue was a major concern of this Embassy and dominated many of our contacts with the Vietnamese Government. But our bilateral relations became increasingly focussed on the problem of the dramatic rise in the numbers of boat people reaching Hong Kong. There were understandable fears that the influx could reach the horrendous proportions of the late 1970s. It became clear, however, that there was a fundamental difference. This time, the overwhelming majority of the boat people were economic migrants with no claim to refugee status. The Hong Kong Government imposed a screening process from 16 June designed to segregate illegal immigrants with a view to returning them to Vietnam.
14. I had, from my arrival in May 1987, been urging the Vietnamese to prevent the departure of boat people and to accept back those few in Hong Kong who wished to return. The Vietnamese had always taken the line that they were doing their best to prevent illegal departures and could take back boat people only on an individual basis, after lengthy examination of their case. Mr Thach, the Foreign Minister, himself made it clear to me that there could be no question of accepting back boat people against their will - this, he said, with the barest smile, would be an infringement of their human rights.
15. By the middle of the year, the sheer size of the problem and Vietnam's desire to cut a more cooperative figure on the international stage, led the Vietnamese Government to change its tune. It proposed bilateral talks. These duly took place in Hanoi in August and London in October. An understanding was reached that an immediate start should be made on the repatriation of the several hundred boat people deemed to be illegal immigrants who had volunteered to return and that "comprehensive arrangements" would be made to deal with the problem as a whole. By this we meant the return of those who did not volunteer. The Vietnamese negotiator acquiesced in this interpretation but it subsequently became not at all clear that this was Mr Thach's understanding. In any case, the hope that the first batch of returnees would be repatriated before the end of the year under UNHCR auspices was not realised, thanks largely to Vietnamese bureaucracy and inefficiency.
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