Aid For Vietnam

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31318, 14 March 1967, Page 16

Aid For Vietnam

Sir,—your correspondent, L. Feniss, supposes that the Roman Catholic and ' the Anglican churches support the Government’s latest decision to increase the number of New Zealand troops in Vietnam. I do not think that the Dean of Wellington would claim to be the official spokesman of the Anglican Church. There are many Anglicans who are opposed to the Government's policy in Vietnam, and there are many Anglicans unhappy about a policy which contributes to increasing distress and destruction at a time when the need for constructive aid is already tremendous.—Yours, etc., (Mrs) BARBARA MOUNTIER March 12, 1967.

Sir, —As our Prime Minister prepares to put his little piece of escalation into operation I hope that he will ponder Mr Podgorny’s warning over the parallel aims of the Chinese and American war hawks. However, perhaps Mr Holyoake agrees with the views of the Anglican Dean of Wellington concerning escalation as reported In the press on March 9: “Vietnam must escalate to a point where we finally get a peaceful solution.” I am not quite sure what this incredible statement means, because it all depends upon what is involved in a “peaceful solution.” The most likely way that this can result from continued escalation is through increasing casualties and finally genocide, at least as far as the Vietnamese people are concerned. I cannot think that this is the sort of peace that the Very Rev. Dean Hurst had in mind.— Yours, etc., W. R. SYKES. Prebbleton, March 11, 1967.

Sir,—Vietnam was very much an election issue. Ask Mr Kirk, who never looked worse than when he tried to get to grips with the argument Obviously civil and military aid must go together at this stage. Elsie Locke is astray on time. The Americans have had combatant forces in South Vietnam only since January, 1965. Before that the war was solely one of the South Vietnamese defending themselves from a Communist aggressor who employed the familiar tactics of terror and butchery. It is significant that free Asian peoples do not demonstrate against the allies’ presence in South Vietnam. Too many of them have suffered at Communist hands. Like the South Vietnamese, the peoples of Laos, Cambodia, Malaya, and, more lately, Indonesia chose to resist rather than fall to the Communists. The atrocities in Tibet are sufficient warning of what Communist liberation means. Yours, etc.,