The Unreal Truce

THE AURA OF UNREALITY surrounding last week's developments related to Indochina is familiar. But last week the confusion came from the genuinely contradictory implications of events on three continents, and did not merely grow out of the government's tendency to cloud any important issue with incomprehensible rhetoric.

Perhaps the most unreal event of the week was the Paris conference on Indochina. The 12-or-13-party agreement that was signed says nothing, means nothing, and is important only for its existence. The document is no international guarantee of peace in Indochina, and is relevant to the chance for peace only because the conference's failure to produce "an act" would have been a major ceasefire violation as blatant as the daily fighting that continues in Southeast Asia.

In Indochina the only certainty is the continued war. Fictions about a ceasefire become increasingly difficult to maintain as the Provisional Revolutionary Government and Saigon Government trade largely accurate accusations of thousands of daily violations. Reputable estimates place the fighting at about the same level as it was last October, including Saigon's division-sized assaults on PRG positions. With 200,000 people made refugees since the ceasefire, we would be hard-pressed to call this peace. The very temporary North Vietnamese threat to delay the second prisoner exchange now completed and the attacks on North Vietnamese truce delegations in Hue and Saigon, parallel the daily truce violations by combat units. These violations of the specifics of the January 27 ceasefire agreement are perhaps no more serious than the thousands of skirmishes and battles that daily make a mockery of the peace, but they are more public symbols of the fragility of the agreement.

Meanwhile, the United States Congress, never able to deny the executive branch its demands for money to fight in Indochina, has grown restive at the possibility of supplying peaceful aid to North Vietnam. At a time when the domestic budget has been slashed by that maniac Nixon, the opposition of some senators is understandable, but other legislators have demonstrated only their own pettiness and shortsightedness with their complaints of giving aid to a former "enemy."

What has happened over the last week holds out little prospect that a lasting peace is coming rapidly to Indochina. Accords in Laos and Vietnam have stopped neither air attacks in Laos nor ground fighting in South Vietnam. Violations of some protocols of the January agreement and the meaningless execution of others demonstrate the nature of the truce. And the Congressional unwillingness to support American reparations is a continuing demonstration of the spirit in which this country waged the war.

But the January accord had a meaning, unlike the recent exercise in Paris. That agreement did stop American air aggression over the North, and for that we are thankful. And it did open the possibility, admittedly slim, that the United States might do something constructive in Indochina for the first time in recent history. And to pursue that constructive aim, we hope that American participation in Indochinese economic aid will not be curtailed.