Red Cross Ignored By North Vietnam

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31152, 31 August 1966, Page 13

Red Cross Ignored By North Vietnam

G\.Z P.A. Reuter —Copyright)

GENEVA, August 29.

North Vietnam had ignored an offer by the president of the International Red Cross Committee to send a mission to Hanoi to investigate the Vietnam conflict.

In a letter to national Red I Cross societies, the committee said its president (Mr Samuel Gonard) took the action in July after other offers of its services by the committee to North Vietnam had been refused.

Mr Gonard proposed a mission should visit Hanoi “with a view to examining, on the highest level, the entire situation created by this conflict,” the letter said. The mission was also to have obtained ‘the possibility for the committee to fulfil its humanitarian task, in accordance with the four Geneva conventions of 1949 for the protection of the victims of war.”

No reply had been received to this offer, a committee spokesman said. The committee said that North Vietnam would not provide a list of the prisoners it had captured. The Red Cross in North Vietnam had refused to distribute to' these prisoners relief supplies made up by the committee from funds sent by the families concerned, the letter said. The committee said it had sent to Hanoi several consignments of medical supplies, most recently in April, 1966, and that the North Vietnamese Red Cross had acknow-,

Hedged their receipt with . I thanks. . The committee’s letter said Jit had made offers of assistdance to the National Libera•jtion Front through its representatives in Eastern Europe i but had had no response to any of them.