Untangling the Knots of the Truce

NOTHING more vividly illustrated the end of the war for the U.S. than the arrival in Saigon last week of Lieut. General Tran Van Tra, chief representative of the Viet Cong on the Joint Military Commission--aboard an American helicopter. Tra, 55, is deputy commander of the Communists in South Viet Nam and the man who directed the 1968 Tet offensive.

He asked to be picked up at Loc Ninh, near the Cambodian border, a town that his troops had captured last spring. Seven UH-1 helicopters, painted with white stripes to signify that they were in the commission's employ, picked up Tra and 29 of his officers, still wearing their jungle-green uniforms; one Viet Cong arrived in Saigon carrying his automatic weapon.

Tra's presence in Saigon was necessary to help untangle the intricate web of arrangements on which the truce depends. The Joint Military Commission needed all four members--from the U.S., North Viet Nam, South Viet Nam and the Viet Cong--before it could begin to work out procedures, let alone stop truce violations by either side. The J.M.C. had to be operating before the International Commission of Control and Supervision--otherwise known as the CHIP commission, after its members. Canada, Hungary, Indonesia and Poland--could get down to business.

Besides all that, President Nguyen Van Thieu's government is due to start bilateral talks with the Viet Cong (more properly, the Provisional Revolutionary Government) in Paris this week. The goal: to create a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, which is supposed to supervise free elections. Then there is a 13-member international guarantee conference, due to convene on Feb. 28.

Just how easily those arrangements could become enmeshed in expressions of continuing enmity became apparent at the start of the week, when the first planeload of delegates from the Provisional Revolutionary Government arrived. South Vietnamese authorities promptly demanded that they fill out customs forms. They promptly refused to do so, since that would imply recognition of the Saigon government. For 20 hours, they sat aboard the plane. By morning, the Poles and the Americans had persuaded the South Vietnamese to waive the formality, and the Communist delegates disembarked. In the afternoon, the performance was repeated when 90 delegates arrived from Hanoi; once again the South Vietnamese reluctantly waived their rules.

Fired. The Saigon regime, however, evened the score. It billeted the Communist delegates in a remote, closely guarded corner of Tan Son Nhut Air Base; one Polish delegate to the ICCS complained that "it's like a concentration camp out there." Presumably as another way of showing contempt for the commission, the South Vietnamese government appointed as its delegate one General Ngo Dzu, who was fired last year for military incompetence and has been accused of corruption. Nonetheless, the four members did eventually meet to discuss the rate of American withdrawal and arrangements for prisoner exchanges. The commission is expected to deploy its 3,300-man force this week at seven regional centers and 26 local communities.

Meanwhile the four-power CHIP commission marked time, waiting for the military commission to get moving. While they were waiting, the 1,160 members of the truce commission --Hungarians wearing their unusual pointed hats, Canadians in the dark green short pants of a kind that had not been seen in Saigon since French colonial days--seemed to be all over the capital. By week's end they, too, were sending out preliminary teams to inspect regional headquarter sites at Pleiku, Danang and Hue.

The two commissions serve as a check on each other, since their supervisory and investigating duties overlap. But the new ICCS has some powers that the former and unlamented International Control Commission did not. It can, for instance, investigate truce violations on its own, without waiting for a complaint from either side. The key factor, of course, is whether the four parties are willing to cooperate. So far the Poles and the Canadians agree that the new commission is graced with a cooperative spirit absent from the old ICC.

Will the 1973 Paris agreements succeed where the 1954 Geneva Accords failed? In many ways, the two agreements are ominously alike. Both provide for a cease-fire to be supervised by a small but relatively powerless international commission; for withdrawal of all foreign troops; and for eventual free elections.

There are differences, of course. In 1954 there was an impotent and virtually defenseless government in Saigon; today the South Vietnamese government has 1.1 million men under arms. In 1954 the U.S. repudiated the Geneva agreements as a "disaster" that might "lead to the loss of Southeast Asia." Today Washington is vitally interested in seeing that more or less the same terms can be made to work.

Among those who feel that the commission is bound to fail is Cambodia's exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose record in predicting events in Indochina has been remarkably accurate. Answering questions cabled by TIME's Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter, Sihanouk said: "I wish I were wrong for the sake of the Vietnamese people, but I believe South Viet Nam will eventually be divided in two--that is, one South Viet Nam satellite of the U.S., and another South Viet Nam run by the Viet Cong--for a while at least. One day a violent confrontation between the two incompatible South Viet Nams will become inevitable...One of the two present antagonistic movements will be completely overpowered by the other."

Yet there are compelling reasons why the cease-fire might work this time round. One is that Washington, Moscow and Peking agree that it is no longer in their national interests to carry on a war in Indochina. Hanoi and the Provisional Revolutionary Government also have an interest in keeping the peace, since the agreement gives them a guaranteed place in the political life of South Viet Nam, which they believe will assure them of their ultimate goal. Besides the prospect of massive reconstruction aid from the U.S. for both Viet Nams--which Hanoi drastically needs to rebuild its industrial plant, destroyed by bombs--the North Vietnamese have an additional motive for making the truce work. They have traditionally played China off against Russia and vice versa; now they have a chance to add a third player to that game: the U.S.

That, according to Washington insiders, is the reason behind North Viet Nam's invitation to Henry Kissinger. He will visit Hanoi from Feb. 10 to 13 and Peking from Feb. 15 to 19. A past master of three-cornered politics himself, Kissinger views the trip to North Viet Nam as "an exploratory mission to determine how we can move from hostility toward normalization." For the North Vietnamese, there is an other dividend. The visit is bound to worry South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu. But if Thieu seriously violates the ceasefire, he would undoubtedly lose his invitation to visit President Nixon in San Clemente and, conceivably, the American aid that keeps him in power.

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