Hanoi Rejects Talks Plan

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31669, 3 May 1968, Page 11

Hanoi Rejects Talks Plan

<N Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) VIENTIANE, May 2. A spokesman for the North Vietnamese Embassy in Vientiane said tonight that a proposal to hold preliminary Vietnam peace talks on a cruiser of the Indonesian Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin was unacceptable to Hanoi.

“This proposal does not meet a single one of President Johnson’s own conditions for preliminary contacts," the spokesman raid. “It shows that the four conditions set by Johnson are merely a pretext for avoiding preliminary contracts. “The United States is look ing for one pretext after another because it wants to continue the war. “First of all, Indonesia is not neutral,” the spokesman said, indicating that Hanoi re-

gards Indoneaia as a proWestern country since President Sukarno’s fall from power. “Furthermore, contacts held on a ship would exclude representatives of other countries and of the press, and would not permit what President Johnson called adequate communications conditions set by Johnson himself.” The United States bid acted swiftly to announce unqualified acceptance of the Indonesian attempt to break a fourweek diplomatic impasse over a site for preliminary discussions. But officials said they would be “awfully surprised” if Hanoi agreed. Washington experts believe President Johnson regained diplomatic advantage by saying “yes" to the first open

effort by a third party to break the deadlock. They expected a reasonably quick answer from North Vietnam, but the consensus was that the Communists would say “no.”

Indonesia offered its biggest warship, the RuSsian-bullt cruiser Irian, yesterday, and said it was ready to station the ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Vietnam’s coastline, and open it to American and North Vietnamese emissaries. The White House immediately welcomed the idea and said a “neutral ship on a neutral sea would be a good meeting place.” The Irian was formerly the Soviet ship Ordzhonlkdte which figured in the mysteri-, ous disappearance of a British naval frogman during Mr

Krushchev's visit to England In 1956.

The Sverdlov class cruiser carried the then Prime Minister, Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, and the Communist Party secretary, Mr Khrushchev, on an official visit to Portsmouth, on April 18. Commander Lionel Crabb, a famous British Naval frogman during World War 11, disappeared on an underwater swim off Portsmouth the next day.