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Ottawa's Complicity in Vietnam (1967)
This pamphlet was published in 1967 by the Student
Association to End the War in Vietnam (SAEWV — usually
pronounced "Save"), an organization that brought together a
students from a wide range of political backgrounds who shared the view
that the antiwar movement should call for immediate withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Vietnam, and for an end to Canada's complicity in the war. Members
of the Young Socialists/Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes played key roles in
organizing and building SAEWV.
The pamphlet was written to
educate Canadians about the war and the role of the Canadian government.
It was also, implicitly, a polemic against those in the antiwar movement
who wanted to call for negotiations, and who opposed raising criticisms of
the Canadian government.
In the interests of
readability, we have divided some very long paragraphs, and indented long
quotations.
See also U.S. Aggression & Canada's
Complicity, published in 1969 by the
Canada Vietnam Newsletter.
OTTAWA'S COMPLICITY IN VIETNAM
a SAEWV pamphlet
SAEWV was founded on March 12, 1967 at a conference
attended by representatives of 15 student Committees to End the War in
Vietnam from Vancouver to Montreal, with a total membership of over 1,000.
SAEWV is an association of committees opposed to
the war in Vietnam. SAEWV welcomes all student organizations opposed to
the war to affiliate with it.
SAEWV was founded on the belief that through
meetings, speak-outs, distributions and demonstrations, the majority of
the Canadian people can be mobilized to end Canadian Complicity.
SAEWV is part of an international movement against
the war in Vietnam, which has the support of a majority of the people of
the world. We see our activities as part of a far broader protest,
especially in the United States, which CAN END THE WAR.
SAEWV holds annual conferences where the leadership
is elected and policy is decided upon. Each committee has delegated
representatives to each conference. Between conferences, the working
committee based in Toronto carries out SAEWV decisions.
SAEWV calls for an end to Canadian complicity and
immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Support the Student Association to End The War in
Vietnam:
Student Association to End the War in Vietnam
758 Yonge Street, Room 6, Toronto 5
...and the latest word
Complicity was compounded by duplicity when
External Affairs Minister Paul Martin recently called for a halt to U.S.
bombing of north Vietnam. Notwithstanding the lavish plaudits from some
opponents of the war (grown weary of waiting for even the least indication
of Canadian government disapproval of U.S. policy) Martin’s proposed halt
was neither “unconditional” nor “permanent.” Martin insists his demand is
limited “to the present time.” And as he told Parliament October 31 (Toronto
Star), the main purpose of a bombing halt at this time would be to
create “a new situation,” in which “new pressures could be brought upon
north Vietnam”—to negotiate.
But what is north Vietnam to “negotiate”? Its
territorial sovereignty? Its terms of surrender to the U.S. bombing
terror tactics? The position of the NLF of south Vietnam? For that
matter, what right has the U.S.A. to negotiate anything in Vietnam?
Martin has not criticized American intervention. He
has not suggested the Americans should prepare to pull out of the main
arena of the war, in south Vietnam. Instead, he has re-affirmed the
Pearson government’s sympathy for U.S. objectives, and even now is
renegotiating the renewal of Canada’s NORAD and NATO nuclear alliance
treaties with the U.S. State Department.
The aim of the bombing pause tacticians, as
described by Life magazine, which also shares Martin’s position, is
to exploit Hanoi’s probable and justifiable refusal to “negotiate” by
providing a cover for renewed escalation of the war in both north and
south, up to and quite possibly including a direct military confrontation
with China, with all that is entailed.
The real opponents of the war against Vietnam are
not concerned with providing Johnson with yet another rationale for
continuing the war. They know there is only one just and enduring
solution—withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops from Vietnam.
In a famous speech at Philadelphia over two years
ago, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson outlined the Canadian government’s
attitude toward the Vietnam war:
“In this tragic conflict the United States
intervened to help South Vietnam defend itself against aggression and at
the request of the Government of that country that was under attack. Its
motives were honorable; neither mean nor imperialistic.”
This explanation of the war has served as the point
of departure for the entire policy of the Pearson government with respect
to Vietnam. How does it correspond to the facts?
The United States has been involved in Vietnam much
longer than is commonly known in North America. The history of its
intervention goes back to the early 1950’s, when the Vietnamese were
entering the closing stages of their struggle to end French colonial
domination of their country. The struggle of the Viet Minh, the mass
peasant army, went on for eight years and involved over four hundred
thousand French soldiers before it finally ended in the victory of the
forces led by Ho Chi Minh. By the time the Viet Minh crushed the French
army at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. the Americans were footing no less than
80% of the French military bill! While the French wanted to negotiate, in
order to salvage what they could, the Americans wanted to extend the war
even then.
As C. I. Sulzberger, New York Times’
diplomatic correspondent, pointed out September 10 of this year, the
Pentagon brass were eager to open their nuclear arsenal early in 1954.
They not only sought to limit the victory of the Vietnamese but to wage
preventive war against the entire Communist bloc. Sulzberger writes:
“Admiral Radford,
Eisenhower’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and profoundly
influential on Secretary of State Dulles, wanted to intervene with
tactical atomic bombs to help France at Dien Bien Phu. But according to
men then prominent in American officialdom, his real hope was to get the
United States engaged first in Indochina then in China in order to provoke
a preventive war against the latter before it became a great power.”
Nor did the United States leave its intentions on
the drawing boards. As Pierre Mendès France. leader of the opposition in
the French National Assembly, revealed in a public speech on June 10,
1954,
“The United States
intervention was to have taken place on the request of France, April 28.
The warships carrying atomic aviation material were loaded and en route.
President Eisenhower was to have asked Congress April 26 for
authorization.”
However, confronted by widespread domestic
opposition to intervention in the war, and unable to count on the support
of its French and British allies, the United States shelved its plans and
attended the 18 power Geneva Conference.
Although, at the time of the Geneva Conference, the
Viet Minh controlled virtually the whole of what is today North and
South Vietnam, the Geneva Accords, as adopted by the world’s major
powers, and supported by the United States government, arbitrarily divided
Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel into two sectors, northern and
southern. The northern sector was to be governed by the Viet Minh; and the
southern sector by the French puppet regime led by the former Japanese
appointed emperor, Bao Dai. A referendum on unification was scheduled for
1956.
The agreement also stated that there would be no
foreign military bases in Vietnam and no military alliances, explicit
or implicit permitted in Vietnam. Also, the Viet Minh were required by the
Geneva Accords to withdraw their military units from the south, which
they accordingly did, turning the area over to Bao Dai.
The Canadian government pretends to base its policy
on observance of these Geneva Accords. But the subsequent history of
Vietnam is one of violation of those Accords, article by article, letter
by letter.
Even while the world’s statesmen were carving up
Vietnam at Geneva, the United States Central Intelligence Agency was
maneuvering to replace Bao Dai, the French puppet, with the American
puppet Ngo Dinh Diem. (New York Times, August 22, 1963) No sooner
had fraudulent elections firmly established Diem as President in 1955,
than he “granted” the U.S. the “right” to build military bases and naval
stations, in complete violation of the Accords of 1954. (More than 115 of
such bases now exist in Vietnam.) Needless to add, the promised elections
on reunification never took place.
Moreover, a counter revolution took place on the
land, under the aegis and protection of the U.S.-backed regime. Bernard
Fall pointed out in U.S. News and World Report (September 28,
1964),
“After the war against the
French was over in 1954, the big Vietnamese landlords came out of
'retirement' on the French Riviera or in Paris or in Saigon, and with the
help of U.S.-trained and U.S.-equipped soldiers, went back into the
countryside and said to the peasants: ‘All right, let’s have our land
back, plus eight years of back rent—1946-1954.’”
At the same time, thousands of peasants who had
supported the Viet Minh, or were suspected of pro-Communist sympathies,
were rounded up and imprisoned without trial.
In the face of these attacks, the peasants resumed
the guerilla warfare which the Geneva “settlement” had interrupted. The
Vietnam civil war, which had started in the early 1940’s in the struggle
against the Japanese occupation regime, resumed. And it began again not
because of any “invasion” by north Vietnamese communists, but as an
indigenous peasant reaction against the repressive tyranny of the
landlord and the U.S. backed landlords’ regime. In 1960, various
opposition parties and guerilla groups came together to form the National
Liberation Front (NLF), the “viet cong” of American propaganda.
As for “infiltration” by north Vietnamese following
the buildup of American forces in the south—a buildup which had stationed
over 25 000 “advisors” in that country by 1964—the U.S. State Department’s
White Paper of February 27, 1965 reported most of the “infiltrators” were
actually southerners who fled north in 1954 to escape the terror in the
south and were now returning to aid the struggle in their homeland. It is
worth noting that the most prominent northern Vietnamese in south Vietnam
is Marshall Cao Ky. In fact, most of the million Catholics who live in
predominantly Buddhist south Vietnam including Marshall Ky, are refugees
from north Vietnam. The rapacious anti-Buddhist discrimination of the
Catholic cliques that rule south Vietnam have provoked massive Buddhist
demonstrations in the cities in recent years.
As a matter of fact both the American and Canadian
governments are well aware of these facts. Former U.S. president Dwight D.
Eisenhower candidly explained why the United States, through dictator
Diem, did not allow the referendum on reunification or the elections
provided for by the Geneva Accords to take place. “If such elections had
been held," Eisenhower admitted in his memoirs, Mandate For Change,
“our Intelligence reports indicated that over 80 per cent of the
Vietnamese would have voted for the Viet Minh.”
Canadian External Affairs Minister Paul Martin, has
admitted the artificial character of the south Vietnam state. In a lecture
on foreign policy delivered at Columbia University, New York, April 27,
1967, Martin stated: “North and South Vietnam must be united ultimately
because they are one people.” (Globe and Mail, Apr. 28, 1967)
How dishonest, then, to continue to speak of the
“infiltration" of “north” Vietnamese into “south” Vietnam, particularly
when such “aggression” is claimed to be the cause of the civil war
in the south. Until the United States began its military intervention in
south Vietnam, there were virtually no north Vietnamese troops in that
region, by the very admission of the U.S. State Department. Yet at the
same time, the National Liberation Front already controlled two thirds of
south Vietnam’s territory, including most of the Mekong Delta south of
Saigon)
In fact the Canadian government’s contention is too
much even for one of its own members. Privy Council president Walter
Gordon was only stating well known facts when he declared in Toronto in
mid-May of this year that “the U.S., for its part, has become enmeshed in
a bloody civil war in Vietnam which cannot be justified on either
moral or strategic grounds.” Gordon continued, “in this war, the strongest
nation in the world has taken sides in a savage civil struggle and
is using its tremendous power to force the other side to quit.” (emphasis
added)
In making these statements, Mr. Gordon was echoing
the opinions of many of the world’s leading statesmen and diplomats. Even
UN Secretary General U Thant has publicly rejected the view that the war
in Vietnam is in fact one against communism.
In a recent speech at Greensboro, N.C., Thant
declared:
“It is nationalism, and
not communism, that animates the resistance movement in Vietnam against
all foreigners, and now particularly against Americans. The Vietnamese
who are fighting Americans are doing so to win their national
independence, not to advance the cause of world communism.” (Globe and
Mail, July 31, 1967)
For his part, the respected American Under
Secretary of the United Nations and former U.S. diplomat, Ralph Bunche made
his views clear when ad-dressing a youth rally at Expo 67 on Hiroshima
Day, August 6:
“The Vietnam war is a war
which threatens world peace at every moment. It is not a war of
ideologies, but a war against a people who have been at war, despite
themselves, for 25 years, and who are fed up with it.”
According to the report in Montreal’s La Presse
(August 7 1967), Bunche was widely applauded when he declared,
“imperialism is no longer simply the colonialism of previous days, but any
interference of any kind whatsoever, in the internal affairs of another
country.”
Clearly, the war in south Vietnam is a civil war, a
war of national liberation, the latest stage in the long struggle of the
Vietnamese people to throw off their colonial rulers—a struggle that has
been going on since the French invasion of 1867. The major aim of the
struggle of the National Liberation Front is that objective shared by all
deep going popular movements for social change throughout the colonial
and semi-colonial world—a radical agrarian reform, which will rid the
Vietnamese countryside once and for all of the parasitic control of
absentee landlords, and allow the peasant to participate in the economic
and cultural life of the country to a fuller degree.
The complete inability of the south Vietnamese
regime and its American allies to counter the NLF’s agrarian reform is
starkly revealed by the flop of the much touted “pacification” program.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the expenditure of $400 million by the
United States and $135 million by the south Vietnam government in this
year alone, reports R. W. Apple of the New York Times (Globe
and Mail, August 7, 1967) , “A total of 1,944 hamlets out of 12,537
are controlled by the Government—less than one in six. The rest are
contested or, to some degree, controlled by the Viet Cong.”
Apple revealed that,
“competent pacification workers are becoming
harder to recruit; the goal of 41,000 by the end of 1967 will not be
reached and those already at work are being killed at a rate of 15 a
week. The 53 south Vietnamese army battalions supposedly protecting the
workers are not doing so. Morale is so bad that 13 of every 100 workers
are expected to desert during 1967.”
He continues:
“A senior U.S. official said recently, ‘There
is at least a two-to-one chance that we will increase the momentum of
pacification over the next 12 or 18 months’. Nothing better than this can
be hoped for, in the opinion of many observers, without a thorough
overhaul of south Vietnamese society—without a second revolution to
counter the revolution, however bogus, that the Viet Cong have promised
for more than ten years. The peasants by and large are apolitical. They
stand by and watch as they are buffeted by the war. They want security
more than anything else, but they can be rallied to an ideal, as the North
Vietnamese and the Viet Cong have sometimes shown. The ideal is nowhere to
be found in Saigon ...
“The best talent in the
current generation has long since been lost. Thousands of men who might be
leading the south Vietnamese are in the National Liberation Front or in
the Viet Cong, heirs to the country’s nationalist revolution against the
French. Of all the Government officers serving as lieutenant colonel or
higher, only two fought on the side of the Viet Minh in the war against
the French. Some potential leaders are languishing in exile as a result
of the purges of the past ten years. Countless others have been killed in
battle.
“In their place stands a
corps of young officers, often incompetent and more often corrupt...
Saigon’s army hardly seems a likely force to lead a revolution, and
whatever can be said of the army can be said of the Government as well.
For the army is the government.”
This is the regime the United States is upholding
in Vietnam. The Vietnam war now costs that country close to $30 billion
dollars a year, more than a third the total “defense” budget. Over 450,000
troops are in Vietnam, more than the French had at the time of their
defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and American deaths have soared to over 12,000.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans have suffered
casualties.
The opinion of the vast majority of the world’s
people, including U Thant, the Pope, and a significant section of American
congressmen, is that the U.S. is carrying on in the manner of a classic
imperialist power, in blatant disregard of the Vietnamese people’s right
of self determination.
But not so, in the opinion of Lester B. Pearson. In
an interview with Alexander Ross in the July 1967 issue of Maclean’s,
Pearson had this to say about the war:
“The North never did form
a separate state by the will of its people. And it tried to prevent South
Vietnam from working out its own arrangements. [!] I’m not arguing that
American tactics and policies since that time have always been wise or
right. [Pearson has yet to say wherein he disagrees with the Johnson
administration’s "tactics.”] But the initial purposes of their
intervention seemed to me to be justifiable and not imperialistic..
Indeed, I think that in many ways the Americans are the least
imperialistic people in history... They don’t want to spread around the
world as the British did, carrying the white man’s burdens and benefits.
They want to stay home and drink Coca Cola and go to baseball games. I
have never met an American abroad who didn’t want to come home.”
There is indeed ample testimony to suggest the vast
majority of American servicemen, especially draftees, presently in
Vietnam, would give their eye teeth to take the first boat out of there,
if they were given the opportunity. But it is abject hypocrisy on
Pearson’s part to equate the sentiments of the average American citizen
with those of the Johnson government. The fact is—and recent public
opinion polls bear this out—the majority of Americans are opposed to the
war.
Faced with ever growing opposition to the war among
wide sections of the Canadian public, however, the Canadian government has
pretended to take an equivocal position; while supporting the basic
premises behind the American presence in Vietnam, Pearson and Martin and
other responsible spokesmen take refuge in a policy they term “quiet
diplomacy.” What exactly is the meaning of this ambiguous phrase?
First, it means that Canada does not intend to
speak out against any aspect of the American policy in Vietnam. The
Globe and Mail reported Pearson’s defence of quiet diplomacy in the
course of the Throne speech debate last May as follows:
“[Mr. Pearson] said to
take sides publicly would serve no purpose and indicated that such a step
might result in Washington not listening to the Canadian government’s
private representations. It was preferable to work quietly in the
international community as a ‘good friend and neighbour’ of the United
States without giving up the option of speaking out if the obligation to
do so became inescapable ... Mr. Pearson said that as a responsible
government a wise course was neither to condemn publicly nor acclaim
publicly either side but to work on the International Control Commission
to bring about an end to hostilities.”
Does this mean then that Canada’s representatives
are working quietly behind the scenes to induce the Americans to withdraw
from Vietnam? Well, not exactly, it seems. Government spokesmen have in
fact gone out of their way to defend American actions. Consider, for
example, the following choice statement by Pearson in the Maclean’s
interview. He had just been asked at what point “private consultations”
with Washington would cease, and the government would be prepared to speak
out against the bombing of north Vietnam. His reply:
“Well it hasn’t yet
escalated to the point where they have destroyed North Vietnam. The
Americans have been perhaps more careful than any great power in history
to avoid the full use of power in the war against an enemy. They have
bombed the North, but they have tried to bomb military targets. They have
killed civilians in the process but that happens in any kind of bombing,
however tragic it may be. Haiphong Harbour, for instance, could have been
put out of action in the last year or two, but they haven’t done that.
They haven’t dropped saturation bombs on Hanoi City. They haven’t
destroyed the country. I wonder what would have happened if a despotic, a
totalitarian government, with overwhelming power, had been faced with this
kind of military involvement.... The Americans, unfortunately for them,
have received no credit for any restraint they may have shown. They have
really got themselves into a messy and a tragic situation.”
Here’s one Nobel Peace prize winner who is not
going to be stampeded into the “dove” faction. No, sir! Only in the event
of the destruction of north Vietnam, says Mr. Pearson, will the government
be “prepared” to oppose its further bombing. Meanwhile, the Americans
should be “credited” for “their restraint.”
Nor does “quiet diplomacy” mean that Canada
refrains from attacking the victim of the American aggression. The
difference in the respective approaches to Washington and Hanoi is
revealed in an interesting comparison by External Affairs Minister Martin
in the course of a recent TV interview: “Quiet diplomacy doesn’t mean that
we don’t tell Washington what we think. It doesn’t mean that we don’t
complain to Hanoi.” (cited in Globe and Mail, May 23, 1967). Canada
talks to Washington; it complains to Hanoi.
The Liberal government (and its Tory supporters)
claim to support a “negotiated solution” to the war. But this is in all
relevant respects identical to the position of President Johnson, who
“justifies’ each successive escalation of the war by pointing to the
“stubborn” (and courageous) refusal of both Hanoi and the NLF—particularly
the former—to capitulate.
Of course, the Pearson government’s support for a
“negotiated solution” to the war is perfectly consistent with support for
American objectives in Vietnam. By their very nature, demands for
negotiations are naturally directed at both sides in the struggle. (If one
side refuses to participate, there can be no dialogue.) Since the Johnson
administration obviously does not intend to negotiate, but is aiming for
total victory over the Vietnamese revolution, and a possible war with
China, the appeals of the advocates for “negotiations” are inevitably
addressed to the victim of aggression, the NLF and the north Vietnamese.
Thus, when U.N. Secretary General U Thant called
for a unilateral ceasefire by the U.S., Pearson condemned his proposal as
“unrealistic” because “it did not appear to require any reciprocal let-up
in the war by the Viet Cong guerrillas.” (Globe and Mail, April 5,
1967).
Far from condemning the American escalation,
Pearson even had the gall to state on June 27 that “even an unconditional
cessation of bombing has now been linked by the authorities of North
Vietnam in certain of the more recent statements, with the withdrawal of
United States forces as well, before negotiations can begin. I hope that
we shall not have this escalation in demand on the side of the North.” (Globe
and Mail, June 28, 1967).
When Martin states, as he did in a speech to the
Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression, that “We take second place to
no country in doing our best to bring the war to an end on honorable
terms,” we can be sure that it is not the honor of the Vietnamese people
which concerns him.
Strange as it may seem, the Canadian government
actually contends that its support of American policy will help bring
about an end to the war: The Globe and Mail of February 27, 1967,
reports Martin as declaring at East Lansing, Michigan, that,
“Canada’s usefulness as a
peace mediator in Vietnam could be destroyed by open criticism of the U.S.
conduct of the war... He said that the North Vietnamese government
believed Canada might be able to play a useful role in promoting peace
under certain circumstances. But Canada’s potential usefulness could be
ended if the Government assumed public positions on day to day
developments...”
In a subsequent interview, on May 23, Martin made
it clear that if Canada had any use whatsoever to Hanoi as a “negotiator”,
it was as a spokesman for U.S. interests.
“If we have a channel open
to Hanoi... it is because we are thought to have the confidence of
Washington. If we should lose that confidence by denunciation of American
policy, we should lose our channel to Hanoi also.” (Globe and Mail,
May 23, 1967)
The logic of that position is to abandon
altogether the prospect of making any “representations” to Washington
with a view to decreasing the escalation. If the Johnson administration
will ignore the anti-war sentiments of the majority of its own electorate,
will it pay any more respect, will it “confide” any more, in a government
which does not differ at all with it privately or publicly? Of course,
what T.C. Douglas has termed the government’s “supine subservience” is
hardly likely to inspire anything more than an indifferent contempt on the
part of the Pentagon warhawks.
As a matter of fact, any “representations” that
Canada makes are addressed to Hanoi, and not Washington. Interestingly,
each major escalation of its intervention by the United States has been
preceded by a visit to Hanoi by a Canadian “peace envoy.” In this way,
Canada plays a key role in a cynical little ritual that has become an
integral part of American tactics in the war; a ritual which has been
described by Bruce Macdonald of the Toronto Globe and Mail
(September 16, 1967):
“They used to say, ‘Beware
of Greeks bearing gifts.’ A more modern version might be, ‘Beware of
Americans talking peace—or risks of war.’ Certainly, over the past few
years a pattern has developed that is no longer explainable by
coincidence, one in which virtually every U.S. step to escalate its
military offensive in Vietnam is either immediately preceded or proceeded
by Administration talk of a renewed initiative to seek a peaceful
settlement of the conflict.”
It used to be Chester Ronning who sallied forth
from time to time to Hanoi. Now the main personage has changed, but the
ploy remains the same. As we write this, the Toronto Star announces
(September 15, 1967) that O.W . Dier, Canadian representative on the
International Control Commission for Vietnam, is having talks with a
number of leading north Vietnamese officials. As the lead on the story
puts it: “Canada’s man in Vietnam has gone to Hanoi to sound out North
Vietnamese authorities on their attitude toward peace talks.” At the same
time, the Americans are creating new apprehension as they start bombing Haiphong Harbour, and make their first major incursions into Chinese air
space.
In fact, Martin is talking through his hat when he
defends Canada’s role of cat’s paw for American aggression, as being
instead that of honest broker between the two sides. Canada has never
pretended to be neutral in Vietnam. Gerald Clark, associate editor of the
Montreal Star caused a flurry last May when he revealed that the 64
Canadian servants who serve on the International Control Commission in
Vietnam “are functioning as spies when they are supposed to be serving as
international civil servants.”
Tim Ralfe, a CBC Ottawa reporter who was formerly
in Vietnam, followed up by saying in a broadcast that it was common
knowledge that Canadians in Vietnam cooperated with the United States.
Canadian members of the ICC, said Ralfe, “see themselves as American
spokesmen on the commission.” He said information from Canadians in
Hanoi—mostly dealing with civilian morale and the effects of the war on
life in the north Vietnam capital, all of it no doubt of considerable use
to American strategists whose escalation tactics are designed to destroy
that morale—is transmitted to Canadian headquarters in Saigon, where two
copies are made. “One is transmitted to Ottawa; the other goes to the U.S.
Embassy in Saigon.” (Toronto Star, May 10, 1967)
The interesting thing about these charges is that
they were never denied by the Canadian government. Instead, Paul Martin
admitted that information from the Canadian ICC representatives “is
properly used in discussions with other countries, including the U.S.” (Toronto
Star, May 10 1967)
As Anthony Westell of the Globe and Mail
commented on May 11, 1967, “The Canadian Government, for example, has made
no secret of the fact that it uses information, gained by its access to
Hanoi through membership of the Commission, to attempt to influence U.S.
policy.”
A couple of months after the Clark-Ralfe exposures,
the north Vietnamese government expelled a Canadian officer serving with
the ICC because his activities were “detrimental to the security” of North
Vietnam. Months previous to his expulsion, however, the official press of
north Vietnam had already explicitly charged Canada with complicity in the
war.
“The Canadian government
has not lived up to its obligations as a member of the International
Control Commission,” declared Nhan Dan, on January 28, 1967. “The
Vietnamese people know full well that the Canadian government has all
along shielded and connived at the acts of intervention and aggression of
the U.S. in both south and north Vietnam.”
The Vietnamese certainly don’t believe Canada is
“neutral” in their conflict.
The Canadian government’s professed “neutrality” is
a fraud through and through. It certainly does not stop the government
from selling arms to the United States for use in Vietnam. In the Star
Weekly Magazine (May 27 1967) Walter Stewart reported:
“I followed just one of
the hundreds of defence contracts placed in Canada every year, and
discovered how TNT made near Montreal wound up in U.S. bombs being dropped
on Vietnam...
“This CIL contract is, of
course, only a tiny part of the Canadian contribution to U.S. striking
power in Vietnam. For instance, Canadian-made de Havilland Caribou
aircraft flown by Australians were used on March 15 to drop 880 gallons of
gasoline on a suspected guerrilla concentration in the jungles southeast
of Saigon. Armed helicopters following the Caribous sprayed the gasoline
drums with tracer bullets, setting the surrounding forest ablaze, and
presumably, frying anyone who happened to be in it.
“Canadian manufacturers
also provide navigational equipment for nearly all U.S. aircraft; small
planes like the Caribou and the twin-engine de-Havilland Otter, for
ferrying arms and munitions around Vietnam; and propellants for air to
ground rockets of the type in most strikes against suspected Viet Cong
villages.
“We are able to make these
sales, and turn a nice profit on the rising Vietnamese death toll, despite
a firm Canadian policy against shipping arms to any war zone, and despite
the fact that we are members of the International Control Commission in
Vietnam, charged with, among other things, keeping munitions out of the
war-torn land.”
But External Affairs Minister Paul Martin told
Stewart, “I don’t know of any Canadian arms going to Vietnam. I don’t know
one.” And he went on to intone:
“I only know the Americans
are sending arms all over the world. They’re going to defend Canada. The
important thing is that not any shipments are going directly from
Canada to Vietnam. We are not responsible for what is going on in Asia any
more than a person who lives in a world with a beast is responsible for
bestiality simply because he has done nothing to bring that beast to an
end.”
Martin concluded this astonishing exposition of his
moral outlook with the pious declaration, “I am a man of peace.” Stewart
goes on to comment:
“As a man of peace, Martin
sees nothing sinister in the soaring sales of armaments from this country
to the U.S. Last year, Canadian defence exports to the Americans totaled
$317 million; the year before, the figure was $259 million; the year
be-fore that, $166 million. This massive increase, nearly 100 per cent in
three years, has meant steady employment for our munitions workers, a
boost for Canada’s balance of payments and, of course, more bullets,
rockets, mortars and death for the Vietnamese...”
Government spokesmen defend these sales of arms as
coming under defence-sharing agreements with the United States. But it is
not merely complying with existing treaties. As Stewart points out,
“The government is
zealously encouraging munitions sales by private firms as well. Teams of
experts from Ottawa’s Defence Production Department scour the U.S. for
contracts which are either turned over directly to Canadian firms or
processed through the Canadian Commercial Corporation which not only
solicits work, but guarantees quality to the American buyer, all at no
cost to our manufacturers. Government funds also cover the tab for
re-search and development projects, which will pour about $60 million into
Canadian companies and universities this year in the unending search for
deadlier weapons...”
Pearson claims it would be impossible to seek a
revision of the defence production sharing agreement, signed in 1959. (Globe
and Mail, April 22, 1967) Not all western countries take the same
attitude, however. The Swedish government has placed a complete embargo on
all sales of arms and military equipment to the United States for the
duration of the Vietnam war.
The Canadian government’s hypocrisy on this issue
becomes all the more obvious when it is recalled that External Affairs
officials revealed only a few months ago that the government has embargoed
arms sales to many parts of the world which it considers “sensitive
areas”, including the Eastern bloc countries, Cuba, the Middle East, India
and Pakistan, Turkey, Greece and Portugal,(the last three NATO allies of
Canada), and many areas of Latin America. (Globe and Mail, April
22, 1967) Apparently, Vietnam is not considered a “sensitive area”.
The irony of Canada’s position has been summed up
admirably by NDP leader, T.C. Douglas:
“Martin has been saying
all along that our role in the ICC makes us so neutral that we can’t
express an opinion on the bombing of north Vietnam; now he says we are so
tied up with the U.S. that we have to sell arms to them, no matter what.
He can’t have it both ways.”
Mr. Douglas emphasizes that the issue is basically
a moral one.
“It is the issue of
whether I am prepared to sell a revolver to a man when I suspect he is
going to use it to rob some old woman of her life savings. You can always
argue that if I don’t sell him the revolver somebody else will, or perhaps
he will buy a shotgun, which is more dangerous. But this does not relieve
me of my moral responsibility. All you can do is live up to your own moral
responsibility and hope it has some effect.”
Blood money
But Canadian arms sales to the U.S. military,
important as they are as a concrete manifestation of the Pearson
government’s support for the American cause, are only what the Rev. Ray
Hord of the United Church of Canada has termed “Blood Money”—the thirty
pieces of silver—in return for the vastly more significant political and
diplomatic whitewash, and active complicity in, the American aggression.
The Liberal government has consistently carried its
craven complicity into the smallest aspects of its foreign policy.
Consider, for example, what happened to the External Aid department’s
“child aid” program. (If we won’t oppose the American atrocities, perhaps
we can at least attenuate public criticism by making a pretense of helping
the victims.) After 14 months of stalling, the government finally
announced the cancellation of the program, which would have cost only a
paltry $500,000 a year, on the grounds that the Saigon regime of Marshall
Ky didn’t want the project. (This did not stop the Ky government from
accepting other Canadian “aid”—for example, the training of its riot
police, for use in the suppression of Buddhist demonstrators.)
But Dr. Gustave Gingras, the Quebec doctor in
charge of the project, doesn’t accept the explanations.
“If you want to do
something, you do it,” he says. “If you don’t, you sit around thinking up
excuses. You know what the holdup is, they say? The Vietnamese won’t pay
for the electricity, for Christ’s sake. Here is a house on fire and a man
is trying to get his kids out and up comes the milkman and says ‘Hey, you
owe me for last Tuesday.’”
As one commentator remarked,
“What is lacking is not
the men or money but will. From the start, the Canadian government has had
neither the drive to prod the south Vietnamese into accepting the aid they
asked for nor the guts to say out loud that Vietnam won't cooperate to
help her own dying children.” (Star Weekly Magazine, April 1, 1967)
Or consider what happened to a Toronto doctor who
was sent to south Vietnam three years ago to teach orthopedic surgery. As
the Star Weekly reports (July 20, 1967):
“In 1964, (Dr. Michael C.
Hall) sent the External Aid office a lengthy list of supplies which he
insisted he couldn’t carry on without.
“ ‘Three months later,’ he
said, they sent me two boxes of plaster.’
“A year later, he repeated
the request. This time he didn’t even get any plaster.
“Instead, a note told him
that the cost of the project would be too high and the Canadian content
too low.
“ ‘Our aid is tied to
Canadian goods and services,’ explained a spokesman. That means 100 per
cent of the equipment sent abroad by External Aid must be made in Canada.
In exceptional cases, this can be trimmed to 80 per cent.
“But even the 80 per cent
figure rules out most or all surgical equipment, Hall pointed out. Little
or none is Canadian made.”
Medical “aid”
After other similar experiences, Hall wrote Ottawa:
“I am the only foreign
surgeon in the country who works with and teaches the Vietnamese in their
own hospitals and universities. Yet I am also the only foreign aid surgeon
who does not have government support in providing materials necessary for
his work.”
The article continues: “...Hall quit and came home.
Today, he sees little hope for Canadian medical aid in Vietnam.
“If there’s a possibility
of Canada doing something worthwhile there, I’d like to be part of it,” he
said. “But unless Canadian policy undergoes some drastic changes, I can’t
see it happening.”
Finally, consider what happened in August when the
Quakers tried to send a small amount of medical supplies from the United
States to Vietnam, via Canada, after the U.S. government had placed an
embargo on medical aid to Vietnam under the Trading With the Enemy Act.
Canadian customs officials, acting on orders from Ottawa, refused to
allow the Quakers to mail the parcels from Canada without authorization
from Washington. Despite continued protest, the Canadian government has
refused to release the Quakers’ medical supplies. Naturally, no such
hesitation is shown when it comes to exporting armaments to Vietnam.
Even the most impartial investigation reveals that
the Canadian government has gone much further than mere passive
“support”, in its defence of American aggression in Vietnam. Canadians who
oppose the war must have no illusions—by all the moral standards of
civilized societies, the Pearson government is guilty of active complicity
in American policy, even by the moral standards enshrined in its own
system of law.
Section 21 of the Canadian Criminal Code states in
part that everyone is a party to an offence who “does or omits to do
anything for the purpose of aiding any (other) person to commit it,” or
who “abets any person in committing it.” The Code also provides that
anyone who “forms an intention in common” with another to “carry out an
unlawful purpose and to assist each other therein”, is equally guilty with
that other person for any and all crimes committed by the latter if he
knew that those crimes were “a probable consequence of carrying out the
common purpose.”
By this provision of the Code, the State puts an
end to nice distinctions between accessories before the fact and
principals in the second degree. Does complicity in a crime become morally
defensible simply because it is committed by a government? According to
the Standards of the Criminal Code, even failure to protest (“omits
to do anything...”) American policy renders the Canadian government guilty
as an accomplice. But Canada is guilty, by commission, not merely
omission.
Conscious complicity
The defendants at Nuremberg pleaded that they were
only obeying orders, that if they had failed to comply, they would have
been subjected to brutal punishments, and that in any case their
abdication would have brought forth others to do the same things. The
government of Lester Pearson and Paul Martin can plead none of these
“mitigating” circumstances. They are conscious agents, fully responsible
in their own eyes as well as in fact. They are, indeed, conscious
accomplices in the American genocide of the Vietnamese people.
The Pearson government has consistently
misrepresented the nature of the struggle in Vietnam, concealing the ICC
reports of their own representatives, which show clearly that the south
Vietnam regime of Ngo Dinh Diem committed far more violations of the
Geneva Agreement than did the government of Ho Chi Minh. The government
has praised American “restraint” while it condemns Hanoi’s “aggression.”
It has hypocritically invoked North American defence treaties to condone
its own merchandising of death, actively soliciting arms contracts for use
in Vietnam. Even paltry “aid” programs have been postponed indefinitely
and cancelled, where they might embarrass the U.S. government by revealing
the extent of the ravage it is inflicting on the Vietnamese.
T.C. Douglas has aptly characterized the south
Vietnam regime of Hitler-loving Marshall Ky:
“From the very beginning
it has been a puppet government supported militarily and financially by
the United States, and to say that the United States was invited in by
South Vietnam is like saying that Edgar Bergen was invited to dinner by
Charlie McCarthy. The fact of course is that the reason the United States
had to intervene is because the puppet government it had set up did not
have the support of its own people, and that today two thirds of south
Vietnam is occupied by the National Liberation Front who collect the
taxes, who run the villages, and who operate the greater part of part of
the country. The government has never been able to hold on to anything but
the cities, and this with a succession of governments because it does not
enjoy the support of the people.” (House of Commons, May 28, 1965)
If it was wrong to intervene in the beginning, it
is no less wrong to continue that intervention today. Dr. Alje Vennema,
the chief of Canada’s medical mission in south Vietnam, and one who knows
the situation in that land, has told Robert Reguly of the Toronto Star:
“The Americans can’t win.
If I had my way, the Americans would pull out by 8 o’clock tomorrow
morning. No, they should leave right away.” (July 18, 1967)
Vennema’s views are shared by many Americans, too,
half a million of whom demonstrated last April 15 in New York and San
Francisco for the immediate withdrawal of their country’s troops from
Vietnam. Whole sectors of American public opinion who have never
demonstrated or joined a peace movement before are adding their voices to
the call: “Support Our Boys: Bring Them Home Now’. “
One of the latest recruits to their cause has been
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who responded to the president’s request to the
churches to “pray for racial harmony” with a scathing indictment of
Johnson’s Vietnam policy which, he declared, had placed the United States
in the position of “the biggest power in the world, fighting an
infinitesimal power.” (Toronto Star August 5, 1967) Urging the
President to “withdraw the troops immediately for the sake of
reconciliation,” Bishop Sheen said: “What is primary is that the greatest
power in the world has to move out.”
Our responsibility
It is becoming obvious to more and more citizens of
Canada too, that this is the only solution to the Vietnam carnage—the
immediate withdrawal of American troops. That is the demand of the growing
anti-war movement in this country. It is not enough to demand
“negotiations” to end the war. The Western powers have nothing to
negotiate, no right to be in Vietnam.
Most important of all—we must demand an end to our
government’s abject collaboration in the war. Each day this war continues,
the closer we approach a conflict with China, and the more menacing
becomes the threat of nuclear annihilation of everything we cherish. No
one can afford to remain silent before this spectacle.
“To sin by silence when we should protest makes
cowards of men.” As the Canadian author, Farley Mowat, has said: “If we
are a people who place any value on ethics or morality, then we must take
an unequivocal stand against the actions of the United States. We must
declare publicly and privately ... that the United States is guilty of a
great crime against mankind.”
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