Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Western powers. The GVN representatives continually referred to their sense of responsibility to the Vietnamese people and to national aspirations for unity and freedom. The obvious dependence of the GVN on the military power of the West was not mirrored by an accompanying political spirit of accommodation: the GVN attitude at Geneva must be characterized as stubborn, unyielding, and idealistic. The GVN was the one nation at Geneva that remained completely unmoved by the spirit of compromise.
- b. GVN Consistently Opposes Partition
The attitude of GVN toward the Geneva Settlement was the product not only of its non-recognition of the DRV, but also of its hostility to partition and its opposition to national elections held in a divided country. Evidently quite independent of American instigation or pressure, the Saigon government concluded well in advance of the Conference termination on 21 July that it could not accept what it regarded as a set of agreements contracted in defiance of Vietnamese aspirations and without GVN consent. Nguyen Quoc Dinh, speaking for the GVN in the third plenary session (12 May) at Geneva, first read into the record in detail the new treaty guaranteeing GVN independence, then laid down his country's unyielding opposition to any agreement which would tend to split the country either geographically or politically. Any document tabled for consideration, said Quoc Dinh, "Must not lead to partition, either direct or indirect, final or provisional, de facto or de jure, of the national territory." Free elections can be held, he asserted, "as soon as the [UN] Security Council has decided that the authority of the State has been established in the whole of the territory, and that conditions of freedom have been obtained."18 In the fifth restricted session, on 24 May, Quoc Dinh again stressed the GVN's total independence from France:
- "...the problem of the independence of Vietnam dominates all events in Indochina whether considered from the point of view of the independence which the state of Vietnam [has] secured as a result of negotiations with France, or from that of the independence which Vietnam must defend from all foreign invaders."19
On the following day, Quoc Dinh repeated in the Sixth Restricted. Session, that the GVN "would not agree to any plan which would result in the partition of Vietnam." Any partition, he said, would incur "the grave danger one would gradually move down a path which would lead to what his people feared most."20 On the 27th of May, Quoc Dinh once again spoke on partition. He reminded the other delegates that the GVN had finally achieved independence, the first of its aspirations. The second, aspiration, also achieved, was territorial integrity. The GVN could not now accept partition "without betraying its own people":
- "With reference to Vietnam, the Vietnam delegation wished to warn the conference against any measures tending to divide the national territory. If a division
