Newsgroups: alt.war.vietnam
From: jewell@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Larry Jewell Kim Jewell)
Subject: Paris Peace Accords (2/5)
Sender: news@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (USENET News)
Organization: Purdue University
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 22:40:32 GMT



Cambodia and the solution of which, of course, must involve as 
well the two Laotian parties and the innumerable Cambodian 
factions.

Let me talk about the provisions of the agreement with respect 
to Laos and Cambodia and our firm expectations as to the future 
in Laos and Cambodia.

The provisions of the agreement with respect to Laos and  
Cambodia reaffirm, as an obligation to all the parties, the 
provisions of the 1954 agreement on Cambodia and of the 1962 
agreement on Laos, which affirm the neutrality and right to 
self-determination of those two countries. They are, therefore, 
consistent with our basic position with respect also to South 
Vietnam.

In terms of the immediate conflict, the provisions of the 
agreement specifically prohibit the use of Laos and Cambodia for 
military and any other operations against any of the signatories 
of the Paris Agreement or against any other country. In other 
words, there is a flat prohibition against the use of base areas 
in Laos and Cambodia.

There is a flat prohibition against the use of Laos and Cambodia 
for infiltration into Vietnam or, for that matter, into any 
other country.

Finally, there is a requirement that all foreign troops be  
withdrawn from Laos and Cambodia, and it is clearly understood 
that North Vietnamese troops are considered foreign with respect 
to Laos and Cambodia.

Now, as to the conflict within these countries which could not 
be formally settled in an agreement which is not signed by the 
parties of that conflict, let me make this statement, without 
elaborating it: It is our firm expectation that within a short 
period of time there will be a formal cease-fire in Laos which, 
in turn, will lead to a withdrawal of all foreign forces from 
Laos and, of course, to the end of the use of Laos as a corridor 
of infiltration.

Secondly, the situation in Cambodia, as those of you who have 
studied it will know, is somewhat more complex because there are 
several parties headquartered in different countries. Therefore, 
we can say about Cambodia that it is our expectation that a de 
facto cease-fire will come into being over a period of time 
relevant to the execution of this agreement. 

Our side will take the appropriate measures to indicate that it 
will not attempt to change the situation by force. We have 
reason to believe that our position is clearly understood by all 
concerned  parties, and I will not go beyond this in my 
statement.

Chapters VIII and IX: Normalizing Relations; Implementation

Chapter VIII deals with the relationship between the United 
States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

As I have said in my briefings on October 26 and on December 16, 
and as the President affirmed on many occasions, the last time 
in his speech last evening, the United States is seeking a peace 
that heals. We have had many armistices in Indochina. We want a 
peace that will last.

And, therefore, it is our firm intention in our relationship to 
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to move from hostility to  
normalization, and from normalization to conciliation and  
cooperation. And we believe that under conditions of peace we 
can  contribute throughout Indochina to a realization of the 
humane  aspirations of all the people of Indochina, And we will, 
in that spirit,  perform our traditional role of helping people 
realize these aspirations in peace.

Chapter IX of the agreement is the usual implementing provision.

So much for the agreement.

PROVISIONS OF THE PROTOCOLS

Prisoners of War

Now, let me say a word about the protocols. There are four 
protocols or implementing instruments to the agreement: on the 
return of American prisoners, on the implementation and  
institution of an international control commission, on the 
regulations with respect to the cease-fire and the 
implementation and  institution of a joint military commission 
among the concerned  parties, and a protocol about the 
deactivation and removal of mines.

I have given you the relevant provisions of the protocol  
concerning the return of prisoners. They will be returned at 
periodic  intervals in Hanoi to American authorities and not to 
American private groups. They will be picked up by American 
airplanes,  except for prisoners held in the southern part of 
South Vietnam, which will be released at designated points in 
the South, again, to American authorities.

We will receive on Saturday, the day of the signing of the 
agreement, a list of all American prisoners held throughout  
Indochina. And both parties, that is to say, all parties have an 
obligation to assist each other in obtaining information about 
the prisoners, missing in action, and about the location of 
graves of American personnel throughout Indochina.

The International Commission has the right to visit the last 
place of detention of the prisoners, as well as the place from 
which they are released.

International Commission of Control and Supervision [ICCS]

Now, to the International Control Commission. You will remember 
that one of the reasons for the impasse in December was the 
difficulty of agreeing with the North Vietnamese about the size 
of the International Commission, its function, or the location 
of its teams.

On this occasion, there is no point in rehashing all the  
differences. It is, however, useful to point out that at that 
time the proposal of the North Vietnamese was that the 
International  Control Commission have a membership of 250, no 
organic logistics or communication, dependent entirely for its 
authority to move on the party it was supposed to be 
investigating; and over half of its  personnel were supposed to 
be located in Saigon, which is not the place where most of the 
infiltration that we were concerned with was likely to take 
place.

We have distributed to you an outline of the basic structure of 
this Commission. Briefly stated, its total number is 1,160, 
drawn from Canada, Hungary, Indonesia, and Poland. It has a  
headquarters in Saigon. It has seven regional teams, 26 teams 
based in localities throughout Vietnam which were chosen either 
because forces were in contact there or because we estimated 
that these were the areas where the violations of the cease-fire 
were most probable.

There are 12 teams at border crossing points. There are seven 
teams that are set aside for points of entry, which have yet to 
be chosen, for the replacement of military equipment. That is 
for  Article 7 of the agreement. There will be three on each 
side and there will be no legitimate point of entry into South 
Vietnam other than those three points. The other border and 
coastal teams are there simply to make certain that no other 
entry occurs, and any other entry is by definition illegal. 
There has to be no other  demonstration except the fact that it 
occurred. 

This leaves one team free for use, in particular, at the 
discretion of the Commission. And, of course, the seven teams 
that are being used for the return of the prisoners can be used 
at the discretion of the Commission after the prisoners are 
returned.

There is one reinforced team located at the Demilitarized Zone 
and its responsibility extends along the entire Demilitarized 
Zone. It is in fact a team and a, half. It is 50 percent larger 
than a normal border team and it represents one of the many 
compromises that were made, between our insistence on two teams 
and their  insistence on one team. By a brilliant stroke, we 
settled on a team and a half.

With respect to the operation of the International Commission, 
it is supposed to operate on the principle of unanimity, which 
is to say that its reports, if they are Commission reports, have 
to have the approval of all four members. However, each member 
is  permitted to submit his own opinion, so that as a practical 
matter any member of the Commission can make a finding of a 
violation and submit a report, in the first instance to the 
parties.

The International Commission will report for the time being to 
the four parties to the agreement. An international conference 
will take place, we expect, at the Foreign Ministers' level 
within a month of signing the agreement.

That international conference will establish a relationship  
between the International Commission and itself, or any other  
international body that is mutually agreed upon, so that the  
International Commission is not only reporting to the parties 
that it is investigating. But, for the time being, until the 
international  conference has met, there was no other practical 
group to which the  International Commission could report.

Cease-fire and Joint Military Commissions

In addition to this international group, there are two other  
institutions that are supposed to supervise the cease-fire. 
There is, first of all, an institution called the Four-Party 
Joint Military  Commission, which is composed of ourselves and 
the three Vietnamese parties, which is located in the same place 
as the International Commission, charged with roughly the same 
functions, but, as a practical matter, it is supposed to conduct 
the preliminary  investigations, its disagreements are 
automatically referred to the  International Commission, and, 
moreover, any party can request the International Commission to 
conduct an investigation regardless of what the Four-Party 
Commission does and regardless of whether the Four-Party 
Commission has completed its investigation or not.

After the United States has completed its withdrawal, the  Four-
Party Military Commission will be transformed into a Two-Party 
Commission composed of the two South Vietnamese parties. The 
total number of supervisory personnel, therefore, will be in the 
neighborhood of 4,500 during the period that the Four-Party  
Commission is in existence, and in the neighborhood of about 
3,000  after the Four-Party Commission ceases operating and the 
Two-Party Commission comes into being.

Deactivation and Removal of Mines

Finally, there is a protocol concerning the removal and  
deactivation of mines which is self-explanatory and simply  
explains-discusses the relationship between our efforts and the  
efforts of the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] concerning 
the removal and deactivation of mines which is one of the 
obligations we have undertaken in the agreement.
Signing The Documents

Now, let me point another problem. On Saturday, January 27, the 
Secretary of State on behalf of the United States, will sign the 
agreement bringing the cease-fire and all the other provisions 
of the agreement and the protocols into force. He will sign in 
the morning a document involving four parties, and in the 
afternoon a document between us and the Democratic Republic of 
Vietnam. these documents are identical, except that the preamble 
differs in both cases.

The reason for this somewhat convoluted procedure is that, while 
the agreement provides that the two South Vietnamese  parties 
should settle their disputes in an atmosphere of national  
reconciliation and concord, I think it is safe to say that they 
have not yet quite reached that point; indeed, that they have 
not yet been prepared to recognize each other's existence.

This being the case, it was necessary to devise one document in 
which neither of the South Vietnamese parties was mentioned by 
name and, therefore, no other party could be mentioned by name, 
on the principle of equality. So the four-party document, the 
document that will have four signatures can be read with great 
care and you will not know until you get to the signature page 
whom exactly it applies to. It refers only to the parties 
participating in the Paris Conference, which are, of course, 
well known to the parties participating in the Paris Conference.

It will be signed on two separate page. The United States and 
the GVN [Government of the Republic of Vietnam] are signing on 
one page and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and its ally are 
signing on a separate page. And this procedure has aged us all 
by several years.

Then there is another document which will be signed by the 
Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of the Democratic 
Republic of Vietnam in the afternoon. That document, in its 
operative provisions, is word for word the same as the document 
which will be signed in the morning, and which contains the 
obligations to which the two South Vietnamese parties are 
obligated.

It differs from that document only in the preamble and in its 
concluding paragraph. In the preamble, it says the United 
States; with the concurrence of the Government of the Republic 
of Vietnam, and the DRV, with the concurrence of the Provisional 
Revolutionary Government, and the rest is the same, and then the 
concluding paragraph has the same adaptation. That document, of 
course, is not signed by ether Saigon or its opponent and, 
therefore, their obligations are derived from the Four-party 
document.

I do not want to take any time in going into the abstruse 
legalisms, I simply wanted to explain to you why there were two 
different signature ceremonies, and why, when we handed out the 
text of the agreement, we appended to the document which  
contains the legal obligations which apply to everybody-namely, 
the four parties-why we appended another section that contained 
a different preamble and a different implementing paragraph 
which is going to be signed by the Secretary of State and the 
Foreign Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

This will be true with respect to the agreement and three of the 
protocols. The fourth protocol, regarding the removal of mines, 
applies only to the United States and the Democratic Republic of 
Vietnam and, therefore, we are in the happy position of having 
to sign only one document.

SUMMARY OF THE NEGOTIATIONS

Now, then let me summarize for you how we got to this point, and 
some of the aspects of the agreement that we consider 
significant, and then I will answer your questions.

As you know, when I met with this group on December 16, we had 
to report that the negotiations in Paris seemed to have reached 
a stalemate. We had not agreed at that time, although we didn't 
say so on the-we could not find a formula to take into account 
the conflicting views with respect to signing. There were 
disagreements with respect to the DMZ and with the associated 
aspects of what identity South Vietnam was to have in the 
agreement.

There was a total deadlock with respect to the protocols, which 
I summed up in the December 16 press conference. The North 
Vietnamese approach to international control and ours were so 
totally at variance that it seemed impossible at that point to 
come to any satisfactory conclusion. And there began to be even 
some concern that the separation which we thought we had 
achieved in October between the release of our prisoners and the 
question of civilian prisoners in South Vietnam was breaking 
down.

When we reassembled on January 8, we did not do so in the most 
cordial atmosphere that I remember. However, by the morning of 
January 9, it became apparent that both sides were determined to 
make a serious effort to break the deadlock in negotiations. And 
we adopted a mode of procedure by which issues in the agreement

 and issues of principle with respect to the protocols were 
discussed at meetings between Special Adviser Le Duc Tho and 
myself, while concurrently an American team headed by Ambassador 
Sullivan and a Vietnamese team headed by Vice Minister Thach 
would work on the implementation of the principles as they 
applied to the protocols.

For example, the Special Adviser and I might agree on the 
principle  of border control posts and their number, but then 
the problem of how to locate them, according to what criteria, 
and with what mode of operation presented enormous difficulties.

Let me on this occasion also point out that these negotiations  
required the closest cooperation throughout our Government,  
between the White House and the State Department, between all 
the elements of our team, and that, therefore, the usual 
speculation of who did what to whom is really extraordinarily 
misplaced.

Without a cooperative effort by everybody, we could not have 
achieved what we have presented last night and this morning,

The Special Adviser and I then spent the week, first on working 
out the unresolved issues in the-agreement, and then the 
unresolved issues with respect to the protocols, and finally, 
the surrounding circumstances of schedules and procedures.

Ambassador Sullivan remained behind to draft the implementing 
provisions of the -agreements that had been achieved during the 
week. The Special Adviser and I remained in close contact.

So by the time we met again yesterday, the issues that remained 
were very few, indeed, were settled relatively rapidly. And I 
may on this occasion also point out that while the North 
Vietnamese are the most difficult people to negotiate with that 
I have ever encountered when they do not want to settle, they 
are also the most effective that I have dealt with when they 
finally decide to settle. So that we have gone through peaks and 
valleys in these negotiations Of extraordinary intensity.

 Now then, let me sum up where this agreement bas left us, 
first, with respect to what we said we would try to achieve, 
then with respect to some of its significance, and, finally, 
with respect to the future.

 First, when I met this group on October 26 and delivered myself 
of some epigrammatic phrases, we obviously did not want to give 
a complete checklist and we did not want to release the 
agreement as t then stood, because it did not seem to us 
desirable to provide a checklist against which both sides would 
then have to measure  success and failure in terms of their 
prestige.

At that time, too, we did not say that it had always been 
foreseen that there would be another three or four days of 
negotiation after this tentative agreement, had been reached. 
The reason why we asked for another negotiation was because it 
seemed to us at that point that for a variety of reasons, which 
I explained then and again on December 16, those issues could 
not be settled within the time frame that the North Vietnamese 
expected.

It is now a matter of history, and it is, therefore, not 
essential to go into a debate of on what we based this judgment. 
But that was the reason why the agreement was not signed on 
October 31, and not any of the speculations that have been so 
much in print and on television.

Now, what did we say on October 26 we wanted to achieve? We 
said, first of all, that we wanted to make sure that the control 
machinery would be in place at the time of the cease-fire. We 
did this because we had information that there were plans by the 
other side to mount a major offensive to coincide with the 
signing of the cease-fire agreement.

This objective has been achieved by the fact that the protocols 
will be signed on the same day as the agreement, by the fact 
that the International Control Commission and the Four-Party 
Military Commission will meet within 24 hours of the agreement 
going into effect, or no later than Monday morning, Saigon time, 
that the regional teams of the International Control Commission 
will be in place 48 hours thereafter, and that all other teams 
will be in place within 15 and a maximum of 30 days after that.

Second, we said that we wanted to compress the time interval 
between the cease-fires we expected in Laos and Cambodia and the 
cease-fire in Vietnam.

For reasons which I have explained to you, we cannot be as 
specific about the cease-fires in Laos and Cambodia as we can 
about the agreements that are being signed on Saturday, but we 
can say with confidence that the formal cease-fire in Laos will 
go into effect in a considerably shorter period of time than was 
envisaged in October, and since the cease-fire in Cambodia 
depends to some extent on developments in Laos, we expect the 
same to be true there.

We said that certain linguistic ambiguities should be removed. 
The linguistic ambiguities were produced by the somewhat 
extraordinary negotiating procedure whereby a change in the 
English text did not always produce a correlative change in the 
Vietnamese text. All the linguistic ambiguities to which we 
referred in October have, in fact, been removed. At that time I 
mentioned only one, and therefore I am free to recall it.

I pointed out that the United States position had consistently 
been a rejection of the imposition of a coalition government on 
the people of South Vietnam. I said then that the National 
Council of Reconciliation was not a coalition government, nor 
was it conceived as a coalition government.

The Vietnamese language text, however, permitted an 
interpretation of the words "administrative structure" as 
applied to the National Council of Reconciliation which would 
have lent itself to the interpretation that it came close or was 
identical with a coalition government.

You will find that in the text of this agreement the words 
"administrative structure" no longer exist and therefore this 
particular, shall we say, ambiguity has been removed.

I pointed out in October that we had to find a procedure for 
signing which would be acceptable to all the parties for whom 
obligations were involved. This has been achieved.

I pointed out on October 26 that we would seek greater precision 
with respect to certain 'obligations particularly, without 
spelling them out, as they applied to the Demilitarized Zone and 
to the obligations with respect to Laos and Cambodia. That too, 
has been achieved.

And I pointed out in December that we were looking for some 
means, some expression, which would make clear that the two 
parts of Vietnam would live in peace with each other and that 
neither side would impose its solution on the other by force.

This is now explicitly provided, and we have achieved 
formulations in which in a number of paragraphs, such as Article 
14, 18(e) and 20, there are specific references to the 
sovereignty of South Vietnam.

There are specific references, moreover, to the same thing in 
Article 6 and Article 11 of the ICCS protocol. There are 
specific references to the right of the South Vietnamese people 
to self-determination.

And, therefore, we believe that we have achieved the substantial 
adaptations that we asked for on October 26. We did not increase 
our demands after October 26 and we substantially achieved the 
clarifications which we sought.

Now then, it is obvious that a war that has lasted for 10 years 
will have many elements that cannot be completely satisfactory 
to all the parties concerned. And in the two periods where the 
North Vietnamese were working with dedication and seriousness on 
a conclusion, the period in October and the period after we 
resumed talks on January 8, it was always clear that a lasting 
peace could come about only if neither side sought to achieve 
everything that it had wanted; indeed, that stability depended 
on the relative satisfaction and therefore on the relative 
dissatisfaction of all of the parties been a rejection of the 
imposition of a coalition government on the people of South 
Vietnam. I said then that the National Council of Reconciliation 
was not a coalition government, nor was it conceived as a 
coalition government.

The Vietnamese language text, however, permitted an 
interpretation of the words "administrative structure" as 
applied to the National Council of Reconciliation which would 
have lent itself to the interpretation that it came close or was 
identical with a coalition government.

You will find that in the text of this agreement the words 
"administrative structure" no longer exist and therefore this 
particular, shall we say, ambiguity has been removed.

I pointed out in October that we had to find a procedure for 
signing which would be acceptable to all the parties for whom 
obligations were involved. This has been achieved.

I pointed out on October 26 that we would seek greater precision 
with respect to certain obligations particularly, without 
spelling them out, as they applied to the Demilitarized Zone and 
-- 
JEWELL@MACE.CC.PURDUE.EDU; Listowner: WWII-L; 
Moderator: BYRD.MU.WVNET.EDU
"Sunday's horoscope is note worthy because of its strange, sudden and wholly 
unpredictable and inexplicable occurrences, affecting all phases of life." 
Your Horoscope" L.A. Evening Herald Express, Sat, 12/06/41 

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