Ceasefire Violations

Salient: Newspapers here have described the violations of the Ceasefire page 10 as if the war hasn 't stopped. Could you tell us of the real position as regards the violations of the Ceasefire? How serious are they?

One of the difficulties is that all the news comes out of the Saigon Command, and the correspondents themselves have been bitterly complaining of this. In fact a number of correspondents have been chucked out, not because they are progressives but because they felt they had to try to get to the truth of the violations. They were prevented from going out on the spot, and checking up for themselves. When the D.R.V. and the P.R.G. members of the quadripartite Joint Military Affairs Commission arrived in Saigon they were immediately put behind barbed wire on Saigon Airport and held absolutely incommunicado; it was absolutely forbidden for the press to come anywhere near them. The first meeting of the quadripartite commission took place with armed military helicopters soaring over the top of the buildings where they were kept. Six tanks were drawn up outside the building with their guns trained on the building and truckloads of troops, armed to the teeth were placed all round the building. The head of the D.R.V. delegation protested and said "you've tried to threaten us ever since the start of the war with your bombs, your shells, your planes, and don't think you're going to have any influence on us through military pressures at this first meeting of the Military Affairs Commission".

That was the atmosphere and the press couldn't get anywhere near. Well known American agencies like N.B.C. and U.P.I. had their chief correspondents thrown out just because they tried to get some sort of contact and check up on the violations. All the news about the violations comes exclusively from Thieu's side. I don't think anybody doubts that Thieu's only chance of survival is to keep the war going. There was a report in the "Chicago Daily News" on March 21st by Larry Green, their local correspondent, who quoted official American figures claiming that tremendous violations had been going on and quantities of tanks, armoured vehicles and North Vietnamese troops were moving down towards South Vietnam in violation of the Agreement. But this correspondent was a tittle bit sceptical and he wrote: "Both the press, which is disseminating the information and the public, which is reading it, are prisoners of what they're being told. There is no way to check the government's claims; to count the trucks moving down the Ho Chi Minh trail or the tanks moving across the Demilitarised Zone, or the communist troops moving into South Vietnam.

There's no way to confirm when or where pictures they might show of the infiltration movements were taken. It should be remembered that in the past there frequently has been little correlation between what was being said officially about conditions and events in Vietnam and reality, except when the news from Washington was bad". He poured complete scepticism on this report of what seemed to be a major violation.

A few days later there was an N.Z.P.A? — Reuter report from Washington which was published in "The New Zealand Herald" on the 29th of March, saying that "the White House Press Secretary, Mr Ronald Ziegler, hinted that Mr Nixon was less concerned than he was two weeks ago by the alleged movement of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and hundreds of tanks into the South in violation of the Ceasefire. Asked how the President felt about the infiltrations Ziegler said the United States had every hope and expectation that all parties would scrupulously observe the Ceasefire".

In other words these 'violations' are what the hard-boiled journalists call 'diplomatic statistics'. To serve some political or diplomatic move the Americans invent things like the 9,000 violations or the 40,000 troops. If it suits them to do away with it then all of a sudden they disappear into thin air. There have been violations from the very beginning by the Thieu forces. After all it's not the N.F.L. who have planes, and Thieu's airforce has been operational until very recently, averaging about 200 sorties a day. They have been moving in to try and take positions around the perimeters of the zones controlled by the N.F.L. I'm sure the N.F.L. have instructions to bend over backwards to avoid responding to provocation and so give pretext for large scale renewal of the fighting. I'm sure that if they push into some sensitive area the N.F.L. will hit back, and that's apparently what has been going on in the last few days.

The very day after the conclusion of the Ceasefire, according to the word I had in Hanoi at the time, the Saigon regime dropped parachutists and carried out a very big operation at the Qua Viet estuary south of the Demilitarised Zone. Aerial bombings preceded this attack, parachutists' were dropped in an attempt to seize territory right up to the Demilitarised Zone. The N.F.L. resisted and flung them back. This was a very sensitive area deep inside the N.F.L. lines, and I suspect the same thing has happened when we keep getting word about a Saigon base encircled by the N.F.L. I imagine that they, parachuted troops in and tried to seize an area inside N.F.L. territory and met strong resistance. But what is clear is that the D.R.V. and the P.R.G. have absolutely no interest in violating the Ceasefire. The Ceasefire Agreement is a good one, a very good one. The only person who has a vested interest in violating the Ceasefire, as he threatened he would, is Thieu. So 1 think all these reports of violations must be taken with a very large grain of salt when they refer to violations by the N.F.L. and the P.R.G.

Salient: On the subject of getting news out of Vietnam can you tell us what was the success of the American blockade, the mining of the harbours and the rivers?

Well it was another of the Americans' inglorious failures. Of course it caused some difficulties at times, but it never prevented supplies moving to the south in the quantities they wanted to move them; as the pattern of the warfare showed. The resistance forces were never short of materials because of that blockade, and right up to the Ceasefire they seemed to have ample quantities of whatever they needed in any particular place. One quality of the Vietnamese is that they are never taken by suprise. They'd anticipated the blockade, the mining of Haiphong harbour, and the renewed bombings, from the time the bombings first started. They'd made alternative arrangements and contingency plans. The day the mines went into operation they pulled a lever and 'Plan B' went into operation, and the supplies never stopped moving towards the front.