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4.
foreseeable internal security problem. That is a judgement which really has to be made by the Governor and then Ministers, taking account of likely trends in effectiveness of the Police Force. But it is an angle that you might want to flag up, perhaps in paragraph 3.
The China angle (covered in para 3 of your note). We have a standing commitment to brief the Chinese on plans for withdrawal of the garrison. We agree that the Chinese would be suspicious and might regard early reduction to a single battalion as a weakening of our commitment to preserving internal security in Hong Kong ("abrogation" is too strong a word). They would probably also see it as a trick to try to deprive them of as much as possible of the defense estate. I personally doubt that the size of the garrison would itself make any difference to their decision about military intervention in extremis, except in the indirect sense that if we lost control of the internal security situation by not having enough forces on the ground, that would itself make Chinese intervention more likely.
We wonder whether it might be worth bringing out at the end of the note the key questions against which this issue will need to be judged. They seem to us to be:
Ministers' and the Governor's judgement about the effect on our ability to maintain internal security in Hong Kong up to 1997.
- How useful the additional battalion would be
to the MOD in the wider picture.
How quickly savings would feed through to help with Hong Kong's problem in managing LegCo.
5. Our South East Asian experts have also seen the draft paper and have asked us to point out the wider implications for the garrison in Brunei. If Mr Hamilton's proposals were adopted, we would need to ensure that a full battalion could be found to replace 6 Gurkha Rifles in Brunei, which would have to finish its tour earlier than scheduled. The Sultan has already raised the issue of whether we intend to extend our garrison agreement beyond 1998 with the Prime Minister. We should therefore be careful about giving any signals that we were taking early decisions on matters affecting
howard19.3LETTERS
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