Assessing a Murderous Cease-Fire

Almost a year has passed since the Paris agreement brought an end to the U.S. fighting role in South Viet Nam, and last week the chief architects of the accord met again to review the current state of their handiwork. Taking time off from his frantic efforts to find peace in the Middle East, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stopped by in Paris to confer with his partner in this year's Nobel Peace Prize, North Vietnamese Politburo Member Le Due Tho.* Later, a U.S. spokesman said that the 4 1/2-hour meeting at the Hotel Majestic had been "good-humored" and that the two men had agreed to keep the "channel of communication" between them open. The paucity of detail was doubtless a reflection of the fact that the cease-fire in South Viet Nam is not working according to plan.

The latest serious violation involved U.S. Captain Richard Rees, 32, leader of a team searching for American dead around a village twelve miles southwest of Saigon. When Rees jumped from his helicopter on landing, a volley of B40 rockets and machine-gun fire suddenly ripped into one of the team's three craft, setting it afire. Rees raised his hands in surrender, but he was promptly shot dead by the Viet Cong.

The U.S. delegation to the Joint Military Commission was properly outraged. In the most bitter denunciation of the Communist side since the ceasefire, the chief U.S. delegate, Colonel William Tombaught, flung Rees' bloodstained jacket onto the conference table at the next JMC meeting. "The treachery of your act lays bare your utter disregard for human life," he told the Communist delegates and then stormed out of the meeting. A day later, the Viet Cong coolly disclaimed responsibility for Rees' death, insisting that they had never agreed to his search mission.

South Viet Nam's chief complaint is that cease-fire violations are continuing at the rate of as many as 150 a day. The Saigon command charges that 11,724 South Vietnamese soldiers and 1,991 civilians have been killed since the ceasefire, but claims that South Vietnamese forces have responded by killing 41,825 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.

The Communists, on the other hand, claim that the major political provisions of the agreement have not been carried out. The essential problem is that the Saigon government does not recognize what the agreement accepted in principle: that two distinct political entities exist in South Viet Nam. As a result, the delineation of territory--into Saigon-controlled and Viet Cong-controlled areas--has never taken place.

Nor has South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu agreed to a political process that would lead to the establishment of a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, as called for by the agreement, and pave the way for national elections in which the Viet Cong could participate.

In Touch. Faced with such an impasse, Kissinger and Tho could do little in their meeting last week but reaffirm their support of the Paris agreement and promise to keep in touch. "No amount of official hand wringing on the Avenue Kleber," remarked a Western diplomat in Saigon, "can affect Hanoi's attempt to hold and aggrandize, and Saigon's attempt to prove that that hold doesn't exist."

The big question is what the North Vietnamese really have in mind. They now have at least 170,000 troops in South Viet Nam--about 35,000 more than at the time of the cease-fire--as well as 600 tanks and tracked vehicles. But most U.S. observers in Saigon doubt that a major offensive is in the offing --at least not now. The Communists are still busy strengthening their position in the South and in the border areas near Laos and Cambodia. Further, in the current mood of detente, they might have trouble getting the enthusiastic support of China and the Soviet Union for a renewal of hostilities at the present time.

*Tho, however, turned down the prize while Kissinger accepted it in absentia.

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