'A Few Words With Allies’

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31560, 23 December 1967, Page 13

'A Few Words With Allies’

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) LONDON, Dec. 22.

While paying tribute to a staunch Australian ally President Johnson has been having a few words, with jome of his less predictable Asian partners, about Vietnam, says “The Times” in an editorial.

Of these, two have latelybecome especially edgy—Thailand, and the principal object

of American succour. South Vietnam. The difficulties are not new They are, in fact, the same old ones, as the records in Washington will show.

| Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman i Rhee and Ngo Dinh Diem had I all adopted the same position. ; They had refused to make I any concession whatsoever to j their Communist opponents, ■while exacting from their American backers the fullest precognition of their own sovereignty and freedom of action.

They have been unwilling to concede the weakness of their own political and military position without American backing, while reacting with an almost paranoid suspicion to any pressure that can be interpreted as an infringement of their sovereignty.

Of course, such tensions between the American and the Saigon Governments have always been there, though kept out of sight. | A visible turn for the worse came in an official American report early this month, re-

veallng with even more force than usual what little progress towards winning the peace was being made by South Vietnamese officials. Now the differences have been brought into the open by the television interview recorded by President Johnson before he went to Australia, in which he urged the Government of South Vietnam to begin informal talks with representatives of the Viet Cong.

Today’s exchanges in Canberra still leave much confusion as to how the question arose and what tentative agreement has been reached between Washington and Saigon. Has any particular Viet Cong representatvie presented himself? Certainly it seems probable that some initiative came from the American side. It would be a pity

if General Thieu’s opposition were to weaken this initiative.

Washington’s urgings for informal talks between Saigon and the Viet Cong are very much to the point and should be pursued without regard to the refusals of the Viet Cong themselves, Hanoi, Moscow or Saigon. However much the word aggression is flung back and forth across the Pacific, the proposal recognises that the war in Vietnam remains at the core a civil war in the south to decide what kind of Government the south shall have.

Only when the war is thus defined may it be possible to get behind the intransigence of both sides to see if such a Government could be brought to power peacefully rather than by the appalling sufferings of this war, “The Times” says.