The Geneva Conference and Agreements
As the French-Vietnamese military struggle was ending, a conference met in Geneva, Switzerland, to settle the conflict. The Geneva Agreements established a cease-fire line in Vietnam, behind which both sides withdrew their military forces, the French to the south, the Viet Minh to the north. The French were to withdraw from Vietnam, and by 1956 an election would be held to reunify the country. All knowledgeable persons knew that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win, something the United States would not allow. It blocked the election it was sure to lose, a decision that shaped all else that followed in Vietnam after 1956. The National Security Council (NSC) understood the propaganda issue involved: “The overall U.S. position in the world would be harmed by U.S. identification with a policy which appears to be directed towards avoidance of elections,” and “world opinion, and for that matter, domestic U.S. opinion, would have difficulty understanding why the U.S. should oppose in Vietnam the democratic procedures which the U.S. had advocated in Korea, Austria and Germany.”37 This internal NSC admission was not shared with the public.
British filmmaker and journalist Felix Greene reports that the deadlock over issues at Geneva was broken when Ho’s government made some far-reaching concessions. Although the Viet Minh controlled much of the country, they agreed to a temporary division of Vietnam that would give them only about half of it. They specified very particular conditions, however: the temporary separation was not to be permanent; elections were to be held by 1956 for reunification; and neither of the temporary zones could establish “international alliances or receive military help from the outside.” Every government at Geneva accepted these provisions, except the Americans and the French-installed regime in the South.38 The United States refused to sign the final agreements, but it pledged that it would not “disturb or interfere with what had been settled there.” It also stated that it favored the principle of free elections under United Nations supervision and that countries in the region should determine their own future. In fact, the United States would kill nearly four million Vietnamese to keep them from truly exercising such self-determination.
As is now known, at the time of the Geneva Agreements, CIA agents under the direction of Colonel Edward Lansdale were engaged in sabotage in and around Hanoi. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who covered the war for two decades, reported that Ho Chi Minh “was aware of secret aggression against the North, immediately after the Geneva Accords went into effect.” He and the former Viet Minh were “aware of the American hand behind false rumors—such as those, spread by the Lansdale team, of Chinese troops raping North Vietnamese girls—and the propaganda campaign to scare Catholics into fleeing to the South to escape the A-bombs [that] would be used against the ‘pagans’ who remained in the North.” Burchett reminds us that Lansdale wrote with pride how one of his teams “had spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company … and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations.” In other words, the United States used a covert operation to disturb the Geneva Agreements that it solemnly pledged it would not disturb.39
The head of the French delegation in Geneva, Jean Chauvel, put U.S. actions and intentions around the proposed 1956 elections—that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would have won hands down—in their proper perspective: “As far as they are concerned, the general elections must be prevented by any excuse whatsoever. The only purpose of the Geneva Agreements, as they see them, is to provide a cover for the political, economic, and military preparations for the conquest.” 40
Historian Gareth Porter also challenges the dominant view in the United States at the time that tyrannical Communist powers, aiming to expand throughout the world, were behind the Vietnamese independence struggle. “The Communist powers did not even attempt to use the Geneva Accords as a framework” to work out a “creative diplomatic compromise” with the United States that might have “avoided the use of force in South Vietnam.” They knew that as the dominant power, the United States would resist any compromise. Over the next twenty years, Washington was to prove this contention true, as it refused to engage in serious negotiations regarding the war in Vietnam until forced to do so after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. It is now clear, Porter argues, that Secretary of State Dulles’s “hard line against any diplomatic compromise in Geneva … [was] aimed primarily at reinforcing Soviet and Chinese fears that the U.S. might continue the war if the Geneva settlement was not acceptable to Washington.”41
When it came to the critical years of the Geneva Agreements and aftermath, including the rise of the brutal Diem regime set up by the United States, the following summary by Noam Chomsky bears repeating and reflection: “The record is quote clear that the Viet Minh … accepted the Geneva Accords in good faith and made a serious effort to initiate discussions that would lead to the elections promised in 1956.” Diem’s regime, however, “took advantage” of this effort and engaged in “an extensive repression in which thousands were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned. By 1959 a good part of the former Viet Minh political structure had been wiped out.”42
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