In the end, Hanoi attended the Geneva Conference on Laos and committed itself to neutrality. Hanoi recognized that the Pathet Lao movement was incapable of making a successful bid for control of the country, even with the help available from the socialist bloc. The movement, in their judgment, was too weak and disorganized to govern a state. By official account, Laotian communist forces had liberated three provinces—Houa Phanh (Sam Neua), Phong Saly, and Xieng Khouang—and parts of four others, which together constituted about three-fifths of the country’s area and perhaps a million of its people.31 On the basis of these successes, Hanoi believed the Pathet Lao had “a wide party base in the provinces.” However, it also thought that the Pathet Lao leadership “from the center to the localities” was “not yet unified.”32 Moreover, the movement had no secure revolutionary bases outside the three liberated provinces. Given these realities, neutralization was a way to buy time for Laotian revolutionary forces, time they could use to consolidate and expand existing bases. Even if the proposed neutralization ultimately failed and hostilities resumed, Laotian communists would by then be better prepared.
A neutralist regime in Vientiane recognized by the international community might also preclude further American encroachment in Laos and possibly elsewhere in Indochina, a development that would isolate the Saigon regime. “Every day,” a member of the National Assembly told his colleagues, “American forces and [allied] Thai forces maneuver across the Mekong River” and “collude with reactionaries in South Vietnam” to “intimidate liberated areas” in Laos. Such activities created a “very big threat to the security of our country and a threat to peace in Southeast Asia and the world.” “We cannot not care about conditions in Laos,” the assemblyman concluded.33 According to this reasoning, Laotian neutrality would deny Washington a base for intervention in Vietnam. Also, a neutral Laos under Souvanna Phouma would have friendly political and economic ties to the DRVN, as Souvanna himself had made clear. Souvanna had also declared his support for the peaceful reunification of Vietnam under the terms of the Geneva accords. Together with the existing neutralist governments in Cambodia and Burma, a neutral Laos would form part of a purportedly neutral bloc that would “undercut the anticommunism of the South Vietnamese Government,” which would find itself “the odd man out” in a Southeast Asia tilted toward nonalignment in the Cold War.34
Finally, Laotian neutrality on terms Hanoi envisaged would facilitate northern support of the southern insurgency. Though largely self-sufficient at the current level of hostilities, that insurgency still depended on supplies and personnel from the North, and when hostilities intensified—an eventuality Hanoi was already preparing for—infiltration routes through Laos would become indispensable. That the movement of North Vietnamese troops and supplies via Laos would constitute a violation of Laotian sovereignty as well as the terms of its neutrality, even then being negotiated, did not trouble Hanoi. In fact, long before the end of this Geneva conference, the VWP Central Military Commission had issued orders to “develop capacity for mechanized transport over new routes still deeper in Laos.”35 In addition, sites in Laos had long served as sanctuaries for NLF leaders and PLAF units, and nothing in the available record suggests that Hanoi ever considered the possibility of ending that practice. In fact, should the Americans widen the war in South Vietnam, revolutionary forces would benefit from safe havens across the border in “neutral” Laos.
Hanoi thus wanted not actual or permanent neutrality of Laos, but neutrality on its terms and for as long as those terms served the purposes of the Vietnamese revolution and its desire to have a friendly, pliable government across the border. That meant until American interest in Laos subsided, until Pathet Lao forces seized power in Vientiane, and until Hanoi had contained the American threat in its own country. Accordingly, Hanoi pushed for a diplomatic solution in Laos in the interests not of peace in that country but of its own anti-American struggle. “I see the danger,” one foreign diplomat wrote, that Hanoi “may profess to favour a neutralist Laos” and even work to that end, but then look on the achievement of that end “as a preliminary step towards a communist take-over.”36 “While it may be that the DRV will hesitate to push the Communization of Laos too hard for their own safety,” another observer remarked, “it is difficult to accept the thesis that they will not push it at all.”37
The Geneva agreement making Laos neutral was signed in July 1962, after prolonged, difficult negotiations.38 It mandated the creation of a coalition government of representatives from the three largest political factions—“reactionaries,” communists, and neutralists. Such a mandate hardly guaranteed peace or stability, but it was “the best which the circumstances allowed.”39 For Hanoi, the arrangement was acceptable: Washington would no longer have a pretext to interfere in Laos if the new government carried out its responsibilities, and with that government’s legitimacy validated by the agreement it would be difficult for Washington to subvert and replace it.
The agreement on Laos was “a big victory” for its people, foreign minister Ung Van Khiem told the DRVN National Assembly. It “restores peace in Laos after many years of war on the basis of recognition and respect for the independence, sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity, and neutrality” of the country. It was also “a big victory for national liberation movements and other forces seeking to preserve peace worldwide.” Perhaps more significantly, Khiem stated, the new agreement “not only reaffirmed the basic clauses of the old [1954] Geneva accords but also reinforced and developed them further,” and in so doing “eliminated a threat of war” by precluding Washington from “intensifying the civil war in Laos and threatening peace in this region.”40 In Nguyen Vu Tung’s later judgment, the outcome pleased Hanoi because it created favorable conditions for the expansion of revolutionary forces and eliminated for the time being the possibility of direct American intervention. Those were essentially the same goals Hanoi pursued in South Vietnam.41
Hanoi welcomed the agreement on Laos as evidence of the VWP’s “policy of co-existence and the peaceful settlement of disputes by negotiation.”42 That sense of success may have prompted the repatriation of PAVN forces from Laos, which reduced the North Vietnamese presence there to less than 250 political and technical specialists by year’s end.43 That at least is the claim made in a PAVN internal history. “After the 1962 Geneva Agreement on Laos was signed,” this unpublished history notes, “to implement our promises, our Central Committee and Central Military Party Commission ordered the withdrawal of all volunteer forces and the bulk of our military specialists back to Vietnam.”44 To first secretary Le Duan, the agreement represented “a big achievement not only for our dear friends of the Laotian revolution but for our entire side.”45 That assessment reflected Hanoi’s conviction that the fate of Vietnam was inextricably linked to that of Laos.46 Important as it was to defeat imperialism worldwide, it was more important for the moment to defeat it in Indochina. Imperialism and socialism could not coexist in a peaceful Indochina. Vietnamese independence and revolutionary success were pipe dreams as long as any part of Indochina remained under the rule of imperialists or their lackeys. Because Cambodian communists were problematic allies, a neutral Laos was all the more important. It would prevent the Americans from interfering in South Vietnam via Laotian territory.47 It also lessened the potential for an immediate conflagration in Indochina.
CONTEMPLATING NEUTRALITY FOR SOUTH VIETNAM
This initial wave of enthusiasm for the idea that neutrality could prove an effective device for getting the Americans out of Laos and precluding a wider war raised Hanoi’s interest in using the same device to the same ends in South Vietnam. Why not, DRVN leaders reasoned, have another round of multilateral negotiations on the neutralization of South Vietnam? In his report to the National Assembly in praise of the Laos agreement, Ung Van Khiem used language clearly suggesting that such a solution might be suitable for southern Vietnam. Neutralization of Laos had “expanded and strengthened the peaceful zone” and thu
s proven to be “a constructive factor for peace and security in Southeast Asia while weakening the network of military bases of the American imperialists in the region.” Those results vindicated “the method of solving pressing international problems peacefully, which the socialist camp promulgates,” Khiem said in a clear endorsement of peaceful coexistence. They also vindicated the views of Ho, Giap, and other leading moderates in the VWP, as suggested above. “To solve the Laotian issue, socialist countries advocated a policy of using a method of peaceful negotiations. The results have shown that the fundamentals of the 1954 Geneva Conference not only cannot be destroyed but [can be] reinforced, [even] supplemented to be made more comprehensive. That demonstrates,” Khiem insisted, “that the method of peaceful negotiations is the best method to solve pressing international problems.” Laotian neutrality thus had “a very important international significance.”48 For Vietnam, it represented a “first step.”49
It might even have been the case that after initially hesitating, Hanoi supported negotiating Laotian neutrality to gauge the prospects for a similar solution to its own crisis in the South. In the judgment of historian Ken Post, it is “evident” that for DRVN leaders in the negotiations on Laos, that country “was acting as a surrogate for South Vietnam, where the struggle now being led by the NLF might also result in such a solution.”50 On many levels, the spirit and letter of the Laos agreement were consistent with the aspirations of the moderate wing of the VWP concerning the South at that juncture. “It is now clear,” Nguyen Vu Tung has noted, “that Hanoi was considering a neutrality model for South Vietnam and therefore thought that the Laotian experience would be applied to South Vietnam.”51
The NLF had broached the issue of neutrality for South Vietnam in February 1961 and actually made it part of its political platform.52 During the first week of the Geneva Conference on Laos in May, DRVN representatives circulated a memorandum, presumably on behalf of the NLF, proposing “the convening of a conference to end foreign intervention in south Vietnam and to consider proposals . . . for [its] neutralization.”53 There seems to have been no substantive response to these proposals. It may have been to test international opinion on the subject of neutralization that in October Hanoi launched a propaganda offensive, a “broad and fierce political struggle,” aimed at precluding further American encroachment in South Vietnam by increasing pressure on Washington to accept such a diplomatic solution to the intensifying crisis there. It did this by denouncing alleged “preparations by the U.S.-Diem clique to bring American forces into southern Vietnam” and stressing the “seriousness” of the threat to peace these preparations posed.54 It was perhaps in the interests of the campaign to promote neutralization that Hanoi in late October called on France to “use its rights and its influence” to make a “precious contribution” to the reduction of tensions in Indochina.55 It might have been part of the same effort that in December Hanoi went to special lengths to impress a visiting Indian diplomat with the idea that DRVN leaders “attached great importance” to maintaining the 1954 Geneva accords on Vietnam “in force.” Tellingly, this diplomat was “struck” by the desire among North Vietnamese leaders for renewed contacts with the Saigon government and thus for negotiations between the two.56 A month later the Foreign Office in London similarly concluded on the basis of information from Vietnam and elsewhere that Hanoi’s desire for negotiations with Saigon and other governments over the status of the South was sincere. The Vietnamese demonstrated a “reasonable attitude” toward “renewed contacts” with RVN leaders, London believed.57
On 18 February 1962, ten days after Washington and Saigon announced the creation of a new American organ with expanded responsibilities to replace MAAG and oversee their military partnership in the South—the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)—DRVN authorities approached Soviet and British diplomats demanding that their governments, as cochairs of the 1954 Geneva Conference, “urgently study effective measures to end U.S. aggression in South Vietnam” and preserve the integrity of the accords that conference had produced. Later in February and then again in March and April, Hanoi repeated the request that the two governments “proceed to consultations with the interested countries to seek effective means of preserving the Geneva settlement of 1954 and safeguarding peace.”58 All these initiatives were indirect pleas for actual negotiations, and thus implicitly for the possibility of settling the status of the South by neutralizing it at least long enough to secure American disengagement.
In early March, during this flurry of diplomatic activity, Beijing publicly called for an international conference on the status of southern Vietnam.59 Later that month, Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk, a neutralist with international credibility, published an editorial in the Cambodian newspaper Nationaliste seconding Beijing’s proposal. Moscow also endorsed the initiative, and in April the DRVN National Assembly debated the “necessity to convene a new Geneva Conference to find a solution to problems lingering since July 1954.”60
By June, then, there were clear signs that Hanoi was seriously considering reconvening the 1954 Geneva Conference or participating in some other international forum to address the crisis below the seventeenth parallel.61 Shortly thereafter, North Vietnamese diplomats in Geneva suggested to Souvanna Phouma and Norodom Sihanouk that the matter of negotiations on neutrality for South Vietnam should be discussed in Geneva immediately after concluding the talks on Laos. One report on these contacts suggests that Vietnamese diplomats had actually tried to blackmail the two men by advancing that the agreement on Laos would never work “so long as there is still a dangerous situation in [South] Vietnam.”62 On 1 July, the NLF dispatched a memorandum to the cochairs of the 1954 conference endorsing Sihanouk’s March proposal, and shortly thereafter declared its willingness to accept a coalition government in Saigon inclusive of representatives of all political, socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic groups in the South.63
Little is known of Hanoi’s internal deliberations on neutrality for South Vietnam as these events unfolded. Circumstantial evidence suggests that some in the Central Committee, and possibly the Politburo as well, were hostile to the idea of holding another Geneva Conference to neutralize the South.64 But in the end, either key leaders or a clear majority in those organs supported neutrality and kept the idea alive. According to Nguyen Vu Tung, Le Duan—surprisingly—was instrumental in that process.65 Support for negotiations that would have ended in neutrality for South Vietnam was indeed uncharacteristic of Le Duan, who almost invariably took militant positions on issues relating to the South. The reasons for this, if he did support the idea, are unclear. Possibly, Le Duan was acting on behalf of the Politburo, which was controlled by moderates. Most likely, Le Duan himself supported neutralization at that juncture as a way to buy time for revolutionary forces and for the party in the South. Whatever the reasoning, Le Duan and the rest of the Politburo agreed to explore the neutrality option in February 1962.66
Thereafter, historian Robert Brigham believes, “neutralism emerged as the centerpiece of the [VWP’s] diplomatic strategy.”67 With that prospect in mind, the Politburo imposed a moratorium on combat operations in parts of the South and “put forth the policy of not allowing military units to resist sweep operations in order to preserve forces” and to encourage peace talks.68 In a cable around this time to COSVN, Hanoi reiterated that “underestimating the importance of political struggle” was “very dangerous.” More interestingly in the context of the evolving debate over neutralizing the South, Hanoi told COSVN that political struggle not only represented “a very efficient weapon and an extremely important force” in the struggle against Diem and the Americans but could also prove “transcendent” in the event of negotiations.69
THE CASE FOR NEUTRALITY
Hanoi’s growing disposition toward neutralizing the South was sensible given current domestic and international circumstances. Foremost among these were the mounting problems below the seventeenth parallel and the pressing need to mitigate them. T
he Kennedy administration’s Project Beefup produced a “massive influx” there of U.S. military and technical personnel as well as military hardware, including more helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, armored personnel carriers, and river patrol boats.70 This hardware, especially the helicopters, “caused considerable difficulty for the revolution,” and “proved” Hanoi’s contention that the Americans were building a striking force of overwhelming potential in the South.71 It was to oversee this massive buildup that Kennedy’s administration had sanctioned the creation of MACV, which would play an ever expanding role in the southern counterrevolutionary effort as the primary American authority in Vietnam.72 In Hanoi’s view, this amounted to “war without a declaration of war.”73 Equally alarming were developing ties between Saigon and the reactionary Nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan. During the first half of 1962, that regime posted a number of its officers to Saigon to train ARVN officers in political affairs while even larger numbers of RVN military and political officials traveled to Taipei for training.74 All this was of “genuine concern” in Hanoi since Nationalist Chinese involvement of any kind in the struggle in South Vietnam may have been intended to provoke Beijing “in a way which no other action could.”75
The cumulative effect of the mounting American involvement in South Vietnam was a marked increase in the combat effectiveness of the ARVN. The battlefield fortunes of Saigon’s armed forces “improved significantly” in 1962, historian Edward Miller has written, “as commanders used their improved mobility to strike more effectively at the enemy.” Saigon was so pleased with the performance of its armed forces that its pessimism of previous months suddenly “gave way to new dreams of victory.”76 According to Mark Moyar, in that year ARVN performance “entered into a steady ascent that was to continue for the remainder of Diem’s term in office.”77 A Vietnamese military history supports these assessments, observing that the enemy’s new “methods of engagement” created “many difficulties for our armed forces” and produced “the loss of a number of [PLAF] units.”78 One insurgent noted that “a number of our cadres and fighters became demoralized when they faced the enemy’s new tactics and schemes,” and some of them were “frightened” by the mere sight of “the enemy’s weapons and heliborne tactics.”79 As David Elliott has observed of these developments, the balance of forces in the South became “unfavorable to the revolutionary side” in 1962.80 The Foreign Office concluded much the same thing when it reported that the North Vietnamese leadership was “clearly bothered by the 10,000 American troops in South Vietnam” and sought “the easiest way to get rid of them.”81 Meanwhile, the strategic hamlet program was growing “by leaps and bounds” and continuing to create logistical and recruitment problems for both the NLF and PLAF.82 COSVN itself admitted at this point that the program was “enlarg[ing] the areas under Saigon’s control and interfer[ing] with cadres’ access to the people.”83
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