Paris Round 3: Ready to Wrap Up the Peace

THE peace talks had reached a dead-end impasse. The original agreements, in effect, were being torn up, and negotiations had to begin anew. South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu was about to blow up any agreement he did not like anyway. So went the ominous reports last week as another lull in the battle for peace inspired nervous speculation. In fact, the situation was not at all that sour. There were sound reasons for cautious optimism as the secret talks were to resume this week and Henry Kissinger resumed his commuting to Paris. In tribute to his tireless comings and goings, some South Vietnamese peasants now describe him as "the king who travels at night."

Thieu remained a prickly obstacle, as he feared, perhaps with some justification, that the nine-point plan worked out by White House Adviser Henry Kissinger and Hanoi's Le Due Tho might seriously undermine his chance to survive. Thieu's personal envoy, Nguyen Phu Due, was received twice by President Nixon in the White House in exchanges described as "very detailed and very frank"--meaning there was sharp disagreement. While Nixon conceded that the proposed agreement was a compromise that could not fully satisfy Saigon, he also emphasized that it gave the Thieu government a fair chance to hold out against the Communists, both militarily and politically. Nixon and Kissinger termed the plan reasonable and urged Thieu, through Duc, to accept it.

The White House still expects Thieu, after a good deal of agony and political posturing, to do just that. Nixon refused to hold a summit conference with Thieu before the agreement with Hanoi was further pinned down, since that would, paradoxically, make Thieu look as though he were either a U.S. puppet or was pushing Nixon into a tougher bargaining stance. Washington feels that the momentum of negotiations and worldwide hopes for an end to the bloodshed is too strong for Thieu to resist. But Nixon also made it clear that the U.S. would not be blocked from a settlement that it considered prudent and workable by any intransigence on Thieu's part. Thus the only Nixon-Thieu meeting contemplated would be as a final gesture of cooperation in which both would approve a settlement after the outline is firmed up in Paris.

Knotty. The single most troublesome difficulty still was what would be required in the way of Communist troop withdrawals from South Viet Nam. The Kissinger-Tho agreement, revealed shortly before the U.S. elections, did not require Hanoi to remove any of its troops. Yet there apparently was a tacit understanding that some would go, although it would not be detailed in writing. This would preserve the Hanoi fiction that there are no North Vietnamese troops there. Thieu insists that all such troops must be removed and that this be guaranteed in print. Kissinger in Paris this week undoubtedly will be pressing for some compromise formula, presumably one that would make the unwritten understanding more explicit. A knotty related problem is whether Thieu will be required to release all political prisoners now held in South Viet Nam. It was revealed that another key question had been resolved in the earlier secret talks: the DMZ would be preserved as a supervised buffer zone between the two Viet Nams.

Also still at issue, but less of a potential sticking point, is the question of just what powers a proposed four-nation, 5,000-man force to supervise the peace would have. While three of the nations (Hungary, Poland and Indonesia) have somewhat grudgingly agreed to perform this difficult chore, the fourth, Canada, is insisting that the commission's procedures be spelled out. Having served on the hapless International Control Commission created by the Geneva agreements of 1954, Canada does not want to repeat what one of its diplomats calls "an exercise in frustration." It wants specific invitations to perform this role from all of the governments involved, a time limit on the commission's existence, an understanding that the supervisory force be unarmed, nonmilitary and confined to observation and supervision, and the creation of some parent multinational body to which to report its findings. Also, Canada insists that reports of a truce violation need not be unanimous. Explained one official: "Under the old I.C.C., the Canadian might have observed an infraction, the Indian said, 'I don't see anything,' and the Pole suggested, 'Let's all go have a drink.'"

Although all of those matters could yet produce a deadlock, Washington still expects substantial progress in this week's resumed secret negotiations. More consultations with Thieu presumably will follow this--and that is when the tough South Vietnamese President apparently will have to bite the bullet and either go along with the accords or watch the U.S. sign without him. He has been warned that a Democratic Congress is not likely to vote any more funds for his government if he holds out, although if he is convinced that the agreement would lead to his demise anyway, this would hardly be persuasive.

Already, there is surprisingly strong feeling among many political and intellectual figures in Saigon that a ceasefire is imminent and that Thieu's position is hopeless. "Thieu is finished," contends an anti-Communist Vietnamese scholar. "He was, perhaps, the man for war. He is not the man for peace. We must have a new man." Agrees Ly Quy Chung, a deputy in the South Vietnamese lower house: "We must prepare for the new political struggle. We must have a new team and not the one that has lost the war, or they will lose again." The battle for political control after a ceasefire, predicts a Saigon economist, "may be as bloody and as difficult as the war."

Smoke. Yet as Saigon's intelligentsia anticipates a cease-fire as all but inevitable, South Vietnamese peasants were not so sure that the years of fighting would ever end. In a hamlet in Binh Duong province, a middle-aged woman sat in front of a hut that had sheltered her family until North Vietnamese soldiers dug bunkers near by and South Vietnamese airplanes bombed the enemy--and her house. "Peace? A ceasefire? Look at our house. This is peace?" she scoffed. Predicted a farmer about both sides: "They will just keep fighting and fighting, while the people stay in the middle. They tell us to put up flags. We put up flags. They tell us to move, we move."

Conflicting reports of the secret meetings between Tho and Kissinger have swept the countryside, creating mostly confusion. A woman idly tapped a stick in the dust at An Duoc hamlet northwest of Saigon and said tonelessly: "Men from the other side came and told us that there would be a cease-fire as soon as Saigon agrees to one. But the Saigon radio says that they want peace but the Communists will not agree. I don't know who to believe." Near by, the black smoke of exploding bombs darkened the sky, and the woman kept tapping the ground listlessly.

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