Viet Exile Government

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31304, 25 February 1967, Page 13

Viet Exile Government

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright)

SAIGON, Feb. 24.

A Vietnamese Gov-ernment-in-exile sponsored by the Communists and including several ranking leaders of the Viet Cong, has been set up in France, according to Saigon newspapers.

The “Ghost Government” reportedly is headed by a scientist, Buu Hoi, a member of the Royal Family of the former Emperor Bao Dai, and it includes Nguyen Huu Tho, the chairman of the National Liberation Front, which is the Viet Cong’s political arm. Tho has been named as Deputy Prime Minister, newspaper accounts said, and another Viet Cong leader, Nguyen Van Hieu, is the Foreign Minister.

The Saigon papers attributed disclosure of the Gov-ernment-in-exile to the Saigon Government’s Under-Sec-retary of Information, Mai Van Dai.

Key Positions Dai said that key positions in the exile Government were held by pro-Communist neutralists and collaborators in the colonial French Government in Vietnam. United States officials in

.Saigon said that they had no information to confirm reports

of an exile Government.

Saigon newspapers quoted a high Information Ministry official as making this comment on the reported coalition of Communists and former colonialists. "This is a clear indication that the Communists are now unable to lure any true nat-

ionalists into their coalition farce and had to seek alliance with a group of has-been politicians who do not represent any political force or tendency in Vietnam.”

General Khanh

The Commander in Chief in the exile Government, the

papers said, was General Nguyen Khanh, who had been the Prime Minister of South Vietnam from early in 1964 to February 1965.

Asked to comment on the reported exile regime, the South Vietnamese Prime Minister, Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky shrugged and said only: “They can do it in France, but not here.”