[vacets-gen] [After Paris Agreement, Cananda saw Vietnam ceasefire as futile]

[Hai Tran]

Hello,

After the Paris Agreement, military aid from the U.S. to South Vietnam was mostly stopped while the communist North received war materiel from the former Soviet Union and China uninterrrupted and unchecked.

With the ICCS rendered as a joke in monitoring compliance of the treaty, Hanoi launched a military attack in March 1975 and took over South Vietnam.

And that is part of the reasons why Vietnamese refugees are scattered around the world today!

Hai

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Canada saw Vietnam ceasefire as futile

The Trudeau Liberals quickly withdrew from a monitoring role, documents show.

JOHN WARD, CP   
2004-09-28
London Free Press


 

OTTAWA -- Canada bailed out of its brief Vietnam peacekeeping mission three decades ago because the government decided the system was skewed in favour of communist North Vietnam. Cabinet records from the spring of 1973, released publicly yesterday, show that the Trudeau government agonized over Canada's role in Vietnam before throwing in the towel. 

A four-nation International Commission of Control and Supervision was set up in the Paris Peace Accords which ended American participation in the long-running Vietnam war. 

Canada, Indonesia, Hungary and Poland formed the commission, which was supposed to monitor a ceasefire and help move the country, then divided between north and south, to peace. 

The commission quickly became a joke, with Poland and Hungary, then members of the communist bloc, turning a blind eye to actions of the North Vietnamese. 

As one cabinet briefing paper said in March 1973, the commission couldn't function. 

"There had been 7,000 violations of the ceasefire recorded," the minutes said. "The commission had been asked to investigate only 31 complaints from which only two reports emerged." 

Canada joined the commission at Washington's urging and the Americans wanted the Canadians to stay. 

Mitchell Sharp, then minister of external affairs, told his colleagues that Washington feared a Canadian withdrawal would disturb a fragile peace. 

In March, the cabinet was divided and decided to stay on for another 60 days. But ministers were getting pessimistic briefings. 

"Given the composition of the ICCS, it is likely to operate to the advantage of the communist side, whatever the balance may be in reality, because only findings and reports against the non-communist side will be unanimous or, in some cases, even possible." 

By May, the cabinet was convinced the mission was futile, although even now some portions of the cabinet minutes are blanked out as secret, presumably because they deal with American material. 

Sharp said the commission was ineffective and had not contributed to peace. 

He also said the bickering on the commission wasn't helping overall relations with Hungary and Poland. 

Washington, he said, would not be upset by a Canadian withdrawal. 

The cabinet agreed to get out. 

The decision may have been bolstered by an intelligence report which predicted the eventual outcome in Vietnam with cold accuracy. It said the impasse would end only when one side or the other launched a full-scale offensive against the other. 

"It would happen in a few months or two to three years," the report said. 

An offensive by the North was launched exactly two years later and Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. 

The cabinet also wrestled with the aftermath of the September 1973 coup in Chile in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet and the military overthrew and killed Marxist President Salvador Allende. 

Some Allende supporters had sought safety in the Canadian embassy in Santiago. Thousands fled the country and looked for refugee havens in a number of countries, including Canada. 

The cabinet, after some debate, decided to allow between 300 and 1,000 Chilean refugees into the country. The ministers refused to throw the doors open, saying the Chileans would have to pass the usual screening process.




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