Monks Fast; Booby-Traps Set; Hanoi’s View

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31161, 10 September 1966, Page 15

Monks Fast; Booby-Traps Set; Hanoi’s View

(N.Z.PA. Reuter—Copyright)

SAIGON, September 9.

Two hundred Buddhist monks each sipped a small glass of hot tea in a Saigon pagoda yesterday, then began a 72-hour hunger strike in protest against Sunday’s national election.

The monks, who have denounced the poll as fraudulent and anti-democratic, hope their fast will be imitated by Buddhist clergy throughout South Vietnam.

The unified church has called for a boycott of the poll, which will elect a National Assembly to draw up a new constitution. Observers see the fast as a final attempt to make the election a failure.

Before beginning the hunger strike, the monks attended a prayer service at the An Quang Pagoda, conducted by the church’s 72-year-old Supreme Patriarch, Thich Tinh Khiet. The Patriarch announced he would join the hunger strike for 24 hours. The rest of the monks will , remain fasting until polling closes on Sunday night. South Vietnam police today uncovered a plot by Viet Cong terror squads to booby-trap anti-Government election pos-

ters and kill anyone trying to tear them down. The plot was the latest incident in the stepped-up communist campaign to keep people away from the polls in Sunday’s national election for a Constituent Assembly. Reports of other terror activities filtered into Saigon from widely-scattered sections of the country. A.A.P.-Reuter reported that the Viet Cong had sent letters threatening death to more than half the candidates in the election, Government officials said today.

In an attack on a hamlet yesterday terrorists assassinated a village chief machinegunned to death the wife and three children of a security official, bombed civilians and soldiers and shot children, U.P.I. reported. The plot to booby-trap election posters was reported at Vinh Long in the Mekong delta area 65 miles southwest of Saigon. Behind several posters in the area, hand grenades with trip wires were found. Anyone trying to remove the posters would set off the

charge, a police spokesman said. About six of the posters were taken down by demolition squads and there were no reports of injuries. The letters to candidates ordered them to withdraw, A.A.P.-Reuter said. The lives of those who insisted on running could not be guaranteed. The letters said the consti-tution-framing assembly, was a puppet of the United States and the “servile" Saigon regime. No Recognition The North Vietnamese Foreign Ministry in a statement issued yesterday said it would not recognise the outcome of the elections. The statement said: "Obviously, by staging the farce of elections to the Constituent Assembly, the United States aims at creating a legal basis for continuing to intensify its war of aggression, consolidate the puppet army and administration and seize the initiative of operations on the South Vietnam battlefield. “The United States and the Thieu-Ky clique have loudly claimed that they will guarantee democratic principles and liberty for the coming elections. But how can there be free elections when 300,000 men of the United States expeditionary corps are riding roughshod over the south of our country and when more than 500,000 men of the puppet army, on the order of the United States, are daily massacring our compatriots in South Vietnam?

“The liberty advocated by the Thieu-Ky clique is the liberty to put oneself to the service of the United States. All the so-called democracy and liberty they are trumpeting are but a clumsy play which can deceive nobody.” The statement also described the elections as “merely political tricks and contrivances of fake democracy, fake freedom and fake independence.”