Bernard Fall Sees Possible Detente In Current South Vietnam Fighting

The threat of military escalation may impel the Communist government in North Vietnam to withdraw its nominal support of the Vietcong insurgents in South Vietnam, Bernard B. Fall, professor of International Relations at Howard University, said last night.

Speaking at a Tocsin-sponsored forum, Fall said that the silent menace posed by the United States' Seventh Fleet, and the bitter memory of 1000 years of Chinese rule might be sufficient to impel President Ho Chi Minh to agree to a permanent stalemate in the current conflict.

"To get South Vietnam at the cost of domestic devastation or Chinese occupation is just not worth it to Minh," Fall said.

The North Vietnamese are preoccupied with the spectre of American intervention, Fall added. They are acutely aware of the sudden toughening of our Cuba policy last October, and fear a similar American change of heart in southeast Asia, he said. They realize that direct particapation in the conflict by the United States would inevitably provoke the Chinese Communists, and that a Communist victory would mark the beginning of another period of Chinese control in Indochina, he said.

American fears of increasing Chinese influence in the affairs of North Vietnam are groundless, Fall said. Minh is a Russian-trained Bolshevik and tends to side with Russia in the current Sino-Soviet dispute, he claimed.

Fall is a French citizen and one of the few Westerners who has visited North Vietnam since the Communists took over ten years ago. He researched his doctoral thesis in Hanol, North Vietnam's capital, in 1953, at the conclusion of the anti-colonial revolution. He returned for two weeks in 1962, as a faculty member of the Cambodian Royal Institute of Administration, and is thus in a position to assess the accomplishments of the Communists from personal experience. "As a matter of hard fact, the Communists have done a good job; they have turned North Vietnam into the only industrialized country in southeast Asia," Fall said.

He attributed North Vietnam's economic progress to Minh's preference for small practical projects over gigantic industrial programs which often prove unworkable.

Fall emphatically dismissed the possibility of internal revolt in North Vietnam. Nobody is starving, and some consumer goods are available, hs asserted. "I've lived under the Nazis and I can tell." He believes that the people are not basically unhappy.