New terms of negotiation

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33049, 17 October 1972, Page 17

New terms of negotiation

(By

VICTOR ZORZA)

The terms being discussed in secret in the Vietnam peace talks include some startling departures from previous formulas. The Communists no longer insist on the inclusion of a “neutral” segment in a three - part coalition government. The outlines of an agreement are beginning to emerge.

The new terms may be deduced from a comparative analysis of what has been said by the parties to the talks. President Thieu of South Vietnam insists that he will not accept the threepart coalition proposed by the Communists nor, he adds in a significant aside, a “two-part” coalition. He has thus disclosed the previously secret key new element in the negotiations. The two-part formula would restrict the coalition to his own side and the Communists, thus bypassing the intractable problem of selecting “neutral” members for the third segment. The neutrals were supposed to hold the balance between the two sides to prevent domination by either. In fact, by shifting their support from side to side, they might have enabled one to dominate the other. A two-part solution was also implied in the latest Communist proposal, which said that members of the “third” segment should be appointed “by consultation” between the two sides. This could make it possible for each side to appoint an equal number of its own supporters to the third, so that in the final count the coalition would be evenly divided. The Communists usually ignore Mr Thieu’s speeches, but they quickly jumped on his rejection of the two-part coalition and implied that the new formula is also

'favoured by the United States. They noted, for instance, that Mr Thieu had described the formula as a manouevre of the “colonialists” —a designation he has lately used to imply his resentment of the United States for trying to impose a settlement.

But how could Dr Henry Kissinger propose any sucn “coalition?” After all, he wrote in 1969 that it was unimaginable that people who had been murdering each other for 15 years could work together as a team to govern the country.

One of Dr Kissinger’s more engaging characteristics, apart from his self-depreca-tory humour —- the last refuge of people who think so highly of their talents that they have to run themselves down in public — is his capacity for learning. Like his master, Dr Kissinger has unsaid and undone many of the things he fervently believed in the past. More recently, he has been saying in private that there “must be” a coalition to end the war, because the Viet Cong could not be expected just to fade away after all these years of fighting.

How could Dr Kissinger reconcile his seeming selfcontradictions? The answer is already taking shape in Vietnam. The “leopard spot” pattern of occupation after a cease-fire, denounced by Thieu, might indeed prove unworkable. But the Viet Cong’s contiguous zones of occupation, some of which are being extended in the present fighting even as others contract, could be defended and administered more easily. The leopard, to coin a phrase, is changing his spots into something like a zebra’s stripes — which may well

prove to be the pattern for a new cease-fire formula. A two-part coalition would not, indeed, try to administer the country as a whole, but would leave it to Saigon and to the Communists to govern their own zebra stripes. The coalition would concern itself, as the proposals of both sides already envisage, with supervising the “free” elections, if and when they come. The coalition would be a figleaf to hide the reality of partition. This may be unacceptable to Mr Thieu. But it is a safe

bet that he could not cheat Dr Kissinger out of the fruit of four years patient work — a settlement by November 7 — as some of those who have long rejected any such possibility are now beginning to admit. Other possible parts of the package, such as the admission of both Vietnams to the United Nations, big-Power guarantees of a settlement, and even the dropping of the demand for the “immediate” resignation of Mr Thieu, may be similarly deduced from open sources.