Overseas reaction to new raids

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32802, 30 December 1971, Page 1

Overseas reaction to new raids

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) PARIS, December 28. France today reacted to renewed United States air attacks on North Vietnam by again urging a negotiated peace, United States withdrawal from Indo-China and neutralisation of the region, United Press International reported.

The Foreign Minister (Mr Maurice Schumann) said that this had remained French policy in Indo-China since it was pronounced by General Charles de Gaulle in a Phnom Penh speech in 1966, Government officials said.

They said he gave the assurances to Mr Vo Van Sung, Hanoi’s permanent diplomatic representative in Paris who visited Mr Schumann at his own request to complain about the American bombings. Mr Schumann told Mr Sung that both he and President Georges Pompidou recently stated de Gaulle’s Phnom Penh speech as French policy for Indo-China. Peace talks The Soviet Union today said that the increased United States air raids against North Vietnam were sabotaging the Paris peace talks, United Press International reported. “The massive air piracy against North Vietnam has been the latest confirmation of the falseness of Washington's assertions concerning a curtailment of United States Air Force operations in IndoChina,” commentator Viktor Mayevsky wrote in “Pravda," the Communist Party newspaper. “Escalating the air war against- North Vietnam, the ruling quarters of the United States at the same time are sabotaging the proceedings of the Paris conference on Vietnam."

“Wretched display”

“More than 200 bombers have been pounding military targets in North Vietnam for three days on end,” said “The Times,” London, today. "This wretched display takes us back to the raids of President Johnson’s day, but where he thought he was doggerly blundering toward some sort of victorious outcome, a much cooler finesse now operates in Washington. “These latest raids are in-

tended as much as a display of power as to demolish military targets, and nowadays power can be dispensed in Vietnam with much' less loss of American lives. As President Nixon moves into a year that, among other things, will take him to Peking, power and political finesse both have to be discreetly brought into service.

"Can Mr Nixon believe that the way to a settlement with Hanoi goes through Peking? Whatever the answer he finds behind the walls of the Forbidden City, he must arrive there with his man

Thieu looking confident in his military command. “But if the raids go on, Mr Nixon will be arriving in Perking with a much less appealing image than he had when the visit was first planned.” Hanoi report Hanoi said yesterday that a “great number of civilians” were killed or wounded in the United States air strikes against North Vietnam, the Associated Press reported. The North Vietnamese Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the North Vietnamese dead and wounded included many women, children and patients in hospitals. The statement was broadcast by Hanoi’s Vietnam News Agency which did not give figures for the number killed or wounded.