Refugee Camps Visited

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31011, 17 March 1966, Page 16

Refugee Camps Visited

(N.Z. Press Association) WELLINGTON, March 16. The South Vietnamese Government would not raise the standard of its refugee camps for fear of “professional” refugees, the Lower Hutt Rotary Mr E. W. Mills said the Government was afraid the refugees might find life in the camps so good that they might not want to leave. Mr Mills, principal of the Petone Central Institute of Technology, spent two and a

half week s in South Vietnam in January. He was studying the refugee problem for the New Zealand Government. Mr Mills said there were 800,000 refugees in South Vietnam, about one twentieth of the population. More than half this total was inadequately housed in camps, and the remainder had gone back to their villages, or had been resettled. Mostly Children He said that 60 per cent of the inmates of the Government camps were children under 16. He had seen no evidence of starvation, but the diet of many people was unsatisfac-

tory and would have an eventual effect on their stamina. Mr Mills said be was sure that many South Vietnamese did not know what the war was about and did not. care whether their Government was capitalistic or communist so long as they were left alone.

Though the Americans and Government troops were getting on top of the Viet Cong, he forsaw a “Korea-type” ending to the war, Mr Mills said. This was with a true, uneasy peace, and armies sitting "eying” each other on both sides of a dividing line. "With every man needed to develop the country, this would be a tragedy,” he said.