Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- of Vietnam were to be sanctioned, the result would not be peace but only a pause before fresh hostilities... Partition would therefore mean sooner or later — probably sooner — a renewal of war."21
On 29 May, speaking in rebuttal to the DRV delegation, Quoc Dinh stated, "it is impossible for a people to accept of its own free will a mutilation of its country...No Vietnamese patriot could accept partition." This marked the fourth successive meeting in which the GVN delegate emphasized his country's point of view on partition, elections, or both subjects. This emphatic repetition continued. In the Seventh Plenary Session, on 10 June, speaking of a statement made by Molotov, Quoc Dinh accused the USSR of laboring under certain misunderstandings of the GVN and, for the fifth time since tabling his proposals, he repeated the DRV position:
- "I noted in his statement...what I suppose was a mistake of inadvertent omission. He said that only the Viet Minh delegation had proposed that a free general election should take place in Vietnam. I'm sorry that I must contradict. The Delegation of the State of Vietnam also had the honor to propose such elections; the difference being that, whereas the Delegation of Viet Minh proposed that there should be no international supervision which, in the present circumstances, means that elections could not possibly be honest and true, the Delegation of the State of Vietnam has proposed that elections should take place under international supervision."22
Quoc Dinh then reasserted the complete independence of GVN from France, referring to the treaty of 4 June 1954. A week later, the Vietnamese delegate was again pushing his case on the floor of the conference:
- "As regards the independence of our country, it is a well-known fact that we have indicated the contents of two treaties we had with the French on that...As regards the elections, we ourselves, in our proposal of May 12, have taken the initiative of proposing elections in Vietnam. These elections must be free, sincere, and supervised. The best control would be exercised by the UN."23
The GVN insistence on territorial integrity and on elections only after full control was pressed with great energy — almost with vehemence — up to the very last moment of the Geneva Conference.
- c. GVN not Informed of French–DRV Agreements
The evidence suggests that it was not until sometime in early July that the Bao Dai government learned of France's readiness to partition the country, given an acceptable demarcation line. According to a
