SOUTH VIETNAM BATTLE

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27688, 18 June 1955, Page 7

SOUTH VIETNAM BATTLE

Government Success Against Rebels (Rec. 9 p.m.) PARIS, June 16. About 100 followers of the rebel Hoa Hao leader, General Bacut, had been killed or wounded in a battle with South Vietnam Government troops in the last 24 hours. A French news agency reported from Saigon today that the battle, in which 15 Government soldiers were killed and 40 wounded, took place in the Mekong river delta, between Cantho and Long Xuyen, in south-west Vietnam. The Imperial Family of Vietnam, meeting in council at Hue, Central Vietnam, today formally disowned Bao Dai, their country’s absentee Head of State. The council, composed of near and distant relatives of the former Emperor, who lives on the French Riviera, adopted a resolution in which they proclaimed the deposition of Bao Dai, deprived him of membership of the Royal Family, and proposed the Roman Catholic Prime Minister (Mr Ngo Dinh Diem) as “President of the Republic.” Bao Dai last month offered to return to Saigon to rule as a constitutional monarch. This was part of a plan he put before the Big Three Western Foreign Ministers when they met in Paris to seek a solution to the Vietnam crisis. The plan provided for a broadlybased Government to include Mr Diem, members of the Royal Family, and politico-religious sects. The new government would draw up a constitution and organise elections. According to the Vietnam High Commission in Paris, the council is empowered to settle all “domestic problems within the family, particularly, those of a moral character.”