Repurposing the Commission
The following text is drawn from the document "A Study of Canadian Policy with Respect to the Vietnam Problem, 1962-1966." The full text of the report can be accessed as a PDF in the introductory page of this exhibit. Each of the sections of this exhibit constitutes a section of the study -- this page is composed of pages 53-66.
***
Perhaps even more fundamental was the realization that Commission membership – as long as the Commission remained in existence and offered real possibilities for contacts acros the lines of the conflict — constituted a demonstrable impediment to Canada becoming associated with the military effort being mounted by the USA, in support of which Washington was mustering contributions from friends and allies who had publicly claimed to share its views on containing wars of national liberation.
A third consideration was that our Commission membership and presence on the ground in Vietnam gave us the right to claim “an independent assessment”.
The future of our participation in the Vietnam Commission formed the subject of a major policy review within the Department in July and August of 1965, and again it was concluded that while there were clearly potential difficulties in continued membership in the Commission, these could not be judged to be sufficiently dangerous to warrant withdrawal or some other radical readjustments of our commitment or policies; the latter might run the risk of creating even greater difficulties for Canada and jeopardizing our claim to participation in international discussions of the Vietnam crisis. In a memorandum to the Minister dated August 25, the Under-Secretary outlined the results of this policy review; three of the paragraphs of this memorandum are of particular interest:
“This analysis has been carefully studied by senior members of the Department to determine whether we might formulate recommendations to you which would take into account, on the one hand the record of the Commission’s disappointing performance in political terms, and on the other, our desire to maintain a non-military presence in Vietnam which gives us a locus standing in international discussions of this matter. On the basis of our discussions, however, I have concluded that there is no feasible readjustment in our activity in the Vietnam Commission that we can make at this time which would not created serious disadvantages in terms of broader Canadian policy objectives. In this connection, it is clear that if we do not maintain active participation in the work of the Commission, we would be under considerably greater pressure to make a direct military contribution; we would also have difficulty in justifying, as we can now, our claim that our assessment of the problem in Vietnam derives from our independent observer position there.
“I have therefore concluded that, all things considered, we can only reaffirm the objectives set last autumn for thee work of the Canadian delegation, namely, to attempt to make the Commission function as objectively and as impartially as possible, and to the extent that this proves incapable of achievement, to establish as clear a record as possible of the Canadian point of view and of responsibility for the Commission’s ineffective or non-objective functioning.
“The main difficulty with this course of action however is that Canada alone, as only one member out of three in the Commission, cannot set the Commission’s pace, and that unless the Indians are prepared to support us in some measure, we can easily become involved in an operation which runs counter to our broader political interests. Thus over the past year, the Commission has taken decision after decision against the South Vietnamese and the Americans, while it has been disturbingly slow to take comparable action with respect to North Vietnamese interference in South Vietnam. If, despite all our efforts to convince the Indians to support us and to make the Commission function in an impartial manner, the Commission continues as it has the past year, we are in a paradoxical position; on the one hand the government in Ottawa states that Canada supports the purposes and objectives of USA policies in Vietnam, while on the other, we are participating in the work of a body in Saigon which is reaching decisions indicating that the South Vietnamese and Americans are repeatedly violating the Geneva Agreement – and this is the more awkward for us because in most instances the facts of the matter are clear and undisputed and in all honesty we must support such decisions by the Commission. Concurrently, we have, as you know, obtained almost no satisfaction in our attempts to have comparable Commission treatment given to evidence of Northern interference. While there have been some hopeful indications recently that Delhi may be in the process of becoming slightly more flexible in its approach, the future of Indian policy remains very much a matter of uncertainty at the moment, and in this connection it is worth noting that the Indian Foreign Minister has not yet, after two months, responded to your most recent personal appeal to him for increased cooperation. The prospects for success in our operations in the Vietnam Commission for the future are not, therefore, very bright.”
If then we were unwilling to extricate ourselves from the Commission, was there any way in which this arrangement – unsatisfactory in so many ways – could be turned to our diplomatic advantage? By now the obstructive realities of attempting to make the Commission record a satisfactory total judgement on the Vietnam situation had come to have less priority and Canadian efforts to force the pace of Commission action were beginning to slow down a little.
The idea of the Commission itself being used as a basis for an initiative had been under consideration for some months, especially with the full realization that the Bacon exercise had collapsed. In all the circumstances, including the increasingly dangerous situation on the ground in Vietnam, we needed a forward diplomatic posture. At the official level, various forms of diplomatic action were considered, including:
(a) the possibility of introducing a resolution at the United Nations;
(b) the possibility of a special political mission being undertaken by a prominent personality acceptable to both sides (i.e. the President of Finland or the President of the UAR);
(c) the possibility of an initiative within the Vietnam Commission. In a memorandum to the Minister dated December 6, the various advantages and disadvantages of the first two alternatives were analyzed, and we came to the conclusion that a Vietnam Commission initiative was the only realistic possibility. (The text of this memorandum is attached as Appendix 35.)
Later in the month, the Minister visited London for discussions with British Ministers, and Paris to attend the NATO Ministerial Meeting. In both contexts, he raised the question of a Commission initiative, and the reaction was one of interest from the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. Stewart, in London, and Mr. Rusk in Paris, although these reactions were more to the idea in principle than to any concrete proposal; we had not really developed such a proposal at that time. Of the various ideas under consideration, the Minister seemed most attracted to the idea of our delegation in the Commission working for a message to the Co-Chairmen proposing that a new Geneva Conference be held to draft new terms of reference (i.e. for the Commission). While Mr. Stewart made no commitment, he seemed to think it was something worth considering further. Departmental thinking with respect to this and other possibilities, was outlined in our Letter of December 13 to Paris, a copy attached as Appendix 36.
By way of providing general background, two extracts from contemporary documents are interesting. In the record of discussions with Mr. Stewart, the following account of Canadian thinking appears:
"Mr. Martin asked how much longer we could stick with the United States in defense of its basic purposes if we did not show that we were taking extraordinary steps toward getting negotiations started. In this connection, our difficulty was that we did not always know what United States intentions were."
Some days later, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Wilson, visited Ottawa prior to a visit to the USA, and in the briefing material prepared for Prime Minister Pearson the following paragraphs were included:
"Canada has supported and continues to support the purposes and objectives of USA policy in Vietnam, namely, to check aggression from without, and to create conditions in which the South Vietnamese can make a meaningful choice about their own future.
"At the same time, we have misgivings about the risks inherent in the rising scale of USA operations undertaken to achieve this end. The really difficult question at this juncture is what other options Washington has open to it.
"The expanding scope of hostilities in Vietnam has given rise to considerable public concern in Canada. The prospect of a further intensification of military operations in the area has added to that concern, particularly in the light of the current absence of any positive indication leading towards a negotiated settlement of the conflict. In this kind of situation of apparent diplomatic paralysis, public opinion is likely to become an increasingly difficult factor to be accommodated by governments which are closely associated with the United States.
"We are not convinced that a completely military solution is possible in the circumstances. While the balance of military advantages may change in a more favorable direction, this in itself may create the danger of building up military pressures to 'finish the job,' thus shifting the emphasis away from the more limited objectives which have characterized USA policy to the present time.
"We believe that an adequate solution in Vietnam can be arrived at only through negotiations, and President Johnson has committed the USA Government to a willingness to undertake unconditional negotiations with the interested governments. We would hope that international efforts could continue to reinforce this determination.”
Then on Christmas Eve, the USA Government initiated a 37-day bombing pause - the bombing was not resumed until January 31 - and a marathon round-the-world peace probe. As part of this latter peace "offensive", McGeorge Bundy paid a special visit to Ottawa on December 29 at the request of President Johnson to discuss the Vietnam situation and the current bombing pause with Prime Minister Pearson. As a result of this meeting and his conviction that the Americans were sincere in their search for peace, the Prime Minister sent a personal message to Prime Minister Shastri of India appealing for follow-up or supporting action by India through any special channels that might be open to the Government of India in approaching North Vietnam or its friends; he also said that any supporting public comment by India would be helpful. With regard to the total American effort: "Another such effort to end the conflict in Vietnam may not present itself for some time to come." (Attached as Appendix 37 is telegram G-440 of December 30 to Delhi.)
In the context of this activity, we learned from Averell Harriman that it was part of his mandate as one of the President’s special representatives to ask the Poles and the Indians if they would be prepared to field a larger supervisory group to police any negotiated settlement. No such request was made to Canada either during the Bundy visit or in President Johnson’s subsequent telephone conversation with the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, however, told the President in general terms that we would be happy to do anything further in the field of diplomacy (i.e. beyond the action outlined in our telegram G-440) to help carry forward the USA peace probe (Ottawa telegram Y-1 of January 1, 1966).
Throughout the pause, diplomatic interest and activity were intense. Understandably, the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, played a particularly forward role in attempting to capitalize on the opportunities opened up by the bombing pause. Amongst other ideas, he picked up our own general proposal that the International Commission might be made to play a role. Initially, the Secretary-General was thinking in terms of proposing to the three members of the International Commission that they issue an appeal for a conference on Vietnam. (This presented obvious difficulties and was not pursued much further.) Subsequently, he evolved a formula for conference participation which would bring together the five Geneva powers, North and South Vietnam, and the Liberation Front, and he raised with us the possibility of the Commission members taking diplomatic soundings to see whether a conference based on this concept might be workable. (The latter idea got nowhere because the proposed inclusion of the Liberation Front as a separate participant was totally unacceptable to the United States.)
In the end, nothing came of the Secretary-General’s efforts because for one reason or another they proved to be unacceptable to the USA - we suspected because the Secretary-General himself had made little secret of his total lack of sympathy for American policy. For our own part, we were skeptical about the precise form which the Secretary-General’s proposals took, and we preferred to have the possibility of a Commission initiative left in general terms, but without letting it recede totally into the background. In fact, we were developing ideas of our own. By mid-January, we were discussing among ourselves the possibility of a senior-level emissary visiting Vietnam as a special representative of the Canadian Government, one of the members of the International Commission. In view of general Polish, Indian, and Soviet attitudes, we were fairly confident that any initiative proposed as a tripartite effort was unlikely to win general support at the moment and that any political exploration exercise - well beyond the Commission’s mandate - would almost certainly have to be done unilaterally.
Although the cooperation of our partners would be worth trying for, it was unlikely to be immediately forthcoming. Even if we had to act unilaterally, we had no wish to deactivate the tripartite Commission concept, partly because Commission membership offered valuable advantages to us, but partly because there was just a remote possibility that the tripartite structure of the Commission might in due course serve to reflect evolving policies on the other side of the conflict. In an attempt to keep this structure alive and showing a semblance of potential vitality, the Minister decided that he wished to approach his Polish and Indian counterparts to see whether the Commission might in certain circumstances take "some action which might carry us some way forward to a negotiation". In his message to the Indian Foreign Minister on February 24, Mr. Martin said:
"... I am not thinking in terms of a Commission initiative directed to the simple purpose of calling for a resumed Geneva Conference. It is my judgment that such a call would not produce results in present circumstances.
"What I envisage are a series of soundings based on the publicly expressed positions of the parties, to the point where the parties themselves may be prepared to enter into informal contact as a prelude, in due course, to formal negotiations".
It was not surprising that the formal replies to these messages, when they were finally received, were cast in terms that were as general as those of the Canadian proposal; we really had not expected anything else. The exercise had been designed to keep the Commission "open for business", to hold policy options open, and finally, as our plans evolved, to provide a kind of background to, or cover or rationale for, the Ronning missions. Without the Ronning missions, the Commission initiative idea would have gone forward but probably at a different pace, and in a different form. (Attached as Appendix 38 are telegrams Y-170 of February 16 to Warsaw, Y-184 of February 24 to Delhi, Warsaw telegram 212 of March 8 and our telegram Y-347 of May 11 to Delhi.)
The prolonged suspension of the bombing was, of course, welcomed by the Canadian Government, and our view was that the longer it was possible for the Americans to hold off a resumption, the more likely it was that Hanoi might respond openly or at least come under political pressure to do so from its friends and supporters. Speaking in the House of Commons on January 20, the Prime Minister applauded the latest USA moves and took a speculative look into the future at what a new settlement - the end result of the negotiations we were all trying to get started - might look like:
"Nevertheless, the United States has suspended air bombing, and I hope it will be able to maintain that suspension as long as possible. I also hope that with patience, as well as determination, this effort by the Americans for negotiations will have some success.
"I should like to read just one sentence from the President’s Congressional address to which I think considerable importance should be attached, but to which not very much publicity has been given. I quote from his address as follows:
‘We will respond if others reduce their use of force; and we will withdraw our soldiers once South Vietnam is securely guaranteed the right to shape its own future.’
"Perhaps progress would be possible if the North Vietnamese even accepted the idea of negotiations. Once that acceptance has been given by both sides, and it has already been given by the United States, it might be possible, on the acceptance of negotiations, to begin a process of withdrawal. Perhaps that is what the President was hinting at as a possibility in that sentence. I do not know. However, Mr. Speaker, in my view, it is perfectly clear that military force alone will not settle this problem, will not resolve this issue either by toppling the regime in the North or by permitting the Communists to absorb the South.
"Perhaps the result - and it is not one that anyone can get any particular satisfaction out of - perhaps the ultimate solution will have to be, as it has been in other cases since World War II, the acceptance of two Vietnamese communities, neutralized, with other countries staying out. So long as the problem is approached in terms of "puppet regimes" or "national liberation struggles," we run the risk of obscuring the basic fact that there are now two communities in Vietnam, and we also run the risk of misjudging the possibility of one community gaining complete ascendancy over the other by military means or by subversion, or by any other means not based on the clearly expressed choice of the people concerned. In the case of two communities that have developed for more than a decade along different lines, and toward which such massive outside engagements have already been made, it seems difficult to believe that one would now be allowed simply to extinguish the other.
"In my view, we should not preclude the possibility of the reunification of Vietnam which, unquestionably, corresponds with the aspirations of the Vietnamese people, and it would be my hope - and I am sure of all honorable members - that when the fighting has ended and peace is restored, the two communities could proceed quickly toward establishing the basis of confidence which would bring about such reunification."
The "two communities" concept was not new in Canadian thinking. It had made its first formal appearance in a special briefing paper prepared for the Prime Minister's discussions with President Johnson following the Columbia River ceremonies on September 16, 1967. At that time, it seemed that an open rift might develop between China and the Soviet Union during the coming winter - in actual fact, the confrontation envisaged did not shape up until some years later, and by then the elements of the problem had changed totally - and if so, opportunities might present themselves from which the Americans might extract advantage. In such circumstances, and assuming success at the forthcoming elections, President Johnson might have found himself with more freedom of maneuver than he had had for the preceding year in Vietnam; thus, if acceptable terms could have been arranged, the USA might have been able to "modify its commitment to a course of action whose continuation could have disastrous results." The briefing paper’s treatment of "acceptable terms" and "a more persuasive deterrent" are of some interest:
"Thus the New Year might conceivably find the Chinese ready to reconsider their policy in Indochina and the Americans politically able to make more satisfactory and durable arrangements. Specifically, a bargain which could, in those circumstances, look attractive to both parties might involve a United States military withdrawal from South Vietnam in exchange for Chinese and North Vietnamese acceptance of the existence of South Vietnam as an independent non-aligned sovereign state: in other words, a return to something like the 1954 settlement. Consideration might even be given to going beyond the Geneva concepts to arrange a more positive political solution. The claims, as espoused by Hanoi and Peking, of the Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (the Viet Cong organization) to a voice in South Vietnamese affairs would have to be withdrawn - which would represent a more significant concession by North Vietnam than by China. All proposals for "reunification by free elections" would be avoided in the bargain, but the possibility of establishing some confederal institutions to deal with such problems as trade, postal services, free or limited movement of families, etc., might be left open to appeal to North Vietnamese interests. If in these circumstances China and North Vietnam continued to refuse to "leave South Vietnam alone" and re-embarked on a program of guerrilla warfare or political subversion, the threat of active and substantial United States military intervention might prove a more persuasive deterrent than the present program of material assistance and advice to South Vietnam. The swift and determined response of the United States to the recent Tonkin Gulf provocations might lend credibility to this argument. If the Chinese and North Vietnamese passive reaction to this vigorous American action can be taken to indicate that they were unable to do anything else, then an anticipated Chinese preoccupation with a threatening Soviet position could lead to an even more persuasive assessment of United States intentions and capabilities."
A copy of the full text of this briefing paper is attached as Appendix 39.
Our records indicate that the Prime Minister did in fact speak to the President along the lines of this hypothesis, and the latter "took note of these ideas."
Whatever validity this analysis may have had at the time, it was quickly nullified by the course of events. Yet the conception of a settlement based on a general acceptance of two Vietnamese "communities" - if not states - remained attractive and seemed sensible and realistic as a long-term goal.
As noted earlier there was a great deal of diplomatic (transcript illegible) during the long pause - partly because the Americans had asked their friends for any support they could give in promoting negotiations, we had concluded that our membership in the Vietnam Commission provided us with a locus standi which was in most respects unique and that there could be an advantage in developing such opportunities for diplomatic action as this situation might make possible. In the beginning, we had thought in terms of the general proposition that members of the Commission, as a broadly representative group with direct access in various ways to all the principal parties concerned, might have some useful role to play in the right circumstances. Such a general approach, however, required a more precise definition if it were to become a basis for action - and we had every reason to be skeptical about the prospects for joint action. We suspected that if action were to be undertaken, it would almost certainly have to be unilateral in the first instance, that is, it would have to be a Canadian initiative; the Minister’s formal approaches to his Indian and Polish counterparts were intended as much to set the stage as to define a working basis for immediate cooperation. Consequently, the concept evolved of Canada as a member of the Vietnam Commission - preferably with the cooperation of the other two members but more probably acting alone - seeking to ascertain in the major capitals concerned whether any basis could be found for discussions between the two sides to the conflict leading towards a negotiated settlement.
This same trend of thought was evident in our response to the situation that developed in New York when, with the resumption of the bombing on January 31 the USA requested urgent Security Council consideration of the Vietnam problem. We knew perfectly well that the North Vietnamese would never consider direct action by the UN, and we therefore agreed with others that if the UN were to make any move that might have even minimal chances of success, the action envisaged would have to be linked effectively to the Geneva Conference machinery. Consideration was given to the possibility of the Vietnam Commission, or more probably its three members, being called upon by Security Council resolution to take soundings in interested capitals in search of a consensus which might make possible a Geneva Conference situation. In the end, however, this, as well as other ideas, came to nothing since there was strong opposition from some directions to the idea of the Security Council taking any action whatsoever - although a blanket condemnation of American policy would doubtless have been acceptable in these opposing quarters.