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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 1. 28th February 1973

[Introduction]

"With the signed agreement, the resistance of our people against U.S. aggression, for national salvation, has won a very glorious victory. This is a very great victory of the most glorious war of resistance in the history of our people's struggle against foreign aggression . . . This victory of the Vietnamese people is also a victory of epochal significance of the forces of socialism, national independence, democracy and peace, of the freedom and justice loving people all over the world".

With those words the Central Committee of the Vietnam Workers' Party and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam hailed the "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam", signed in Paris on January 27th, 1973.

Hanoi's jubilant description of the Peace Agreement was echoed in Peking and Moscow. Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese leaders told the leaders of the D.R.V., the South Vietnamese National Front for Liberation and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam that the agreement was a great victory for the people of Vietnam and for all the people of Indochina and a "common victory for the people of the whole world, the American people included". The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, also described the Peace Agreement as a great victory for the Vietnamese people and for the forces of peace.

The meaning of these statements is quite clear. What is not clear however is how Nixon could say the Agreement brought the United Slates "peace with honour", and, more basically, why the United States and its underling in Saigon — 'the Government of the Republic of Vietnam' — signed it at all. If Nixon could put his Government's name to the Agreement then how could the communist states see it as a great victory over U.S. aggression? It is not surprising therefore that some people in the anti-war movement in New Zealand and overseas have greeted the Agreement with scepticism and mistrust. A few have even said that the Vietnamese peple have been "sold-out" to the Americans by their leaders.