Gathering marks 50 years of Vietnam - US People’s Peace Treaty
The Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations (VUFO)’s Vietnam - US Society (VUS) and the US’s Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (VPCC) held a friendship meeting on April 20 to mark the 50th anniversary of the People’s Peace Treaty between Vietnam and the US.
VNA Tuesday, April 20, 2021 18:42
Gathering marks 50 years of Vietnam - US People’s Peace Treaty hinh anh 1
At the event (Photo: VNA)
Hanoi (VNA) - The Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations (VUFO)’s Vietnam - US Society (VUS) and the US’s Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (VPCC) held a friendship meeting on April 20 to mark the 50th anniversary of the People’s Peace Treaty between Vietnam and the US.
Held via video conference, the meeting was co-chaired by John McAuliff from the VPCC and VUS General Secretary Bui Van Nghi.
The meeting aimed to share information on an outstanding event among student movements against the war both in Vietnam and in the US, and the role of the people’s movements during important historic periods.
The People’s Peace Treaty was signed by representatives of four US and Vietnamese student organisations in 1971, reflecting their common aspiration for peace and raising a strong voice to end the war waged by the US in Vietnam.
It also contributed to encouraging anti-war movements by American students and peace lovers and pushing Vietnam’s fight for national independence.
Speaking at the event, VUFO President Nguyen Phuong Nga expressed her hope that the friendship between the two peoples, especially the younger generations, will grow further, contributing to promoting the comprehensive partnership between the two countries.
Pham Van Chuong, Chairman of the Vietnam Committee for Asian - African - Latin America Solidarity and Cooperation, Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation, and Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Peace Committee, affirmed that the anti-war movement in the US and the signing of the treaty were unprecedented in history, demonstrating the aspiration for peace among progressive Americans and others around the world.
https://en.vietnamplus.vn/Utilities/Print.aspx?contentid=200404
PPT 50th Anniversary Webinar
20 April 2021
Remarks from Phạm Văn Chương
1. Today, we Vietnamese and Americans are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the People’s Peace Treaty. I am thinking about the late Đỗ Văn Hiền and David Ifshin, two of the four Treaty signers. They are no longer with us, but I believe up there they could be happy to see that down here we are following in their footsteps.
2. The events in
Saigon and Hanoi in December 1970 were not the first meetings between representatives
of people’s organizations from the United States and the two parts of Vietnam
in joint efforts towards an end to the war and the return of peace. For
instance, there had been such meetings in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1965; Paris,
France, in 1967; Bratislava, Slovakia now, also in 1967; and Niagara Falls,
Canada, in 1969. But, all these were held outside Vietnam, while the PPT events
took place right on Vietnamese soil, where the war was raging, and particularly
in Saigon, from where the US Military Command was directing the war day in day
out.
Moreover, while joining
the other events were 3 groups – American, Democratic Republic of Vietnam and
NFL (National Front for Liberation) / PRG (Provisional Revolutionary
Government), joining the 1970 events were 4 groups – the above-mentioned three
plus the Saigon-based student movement with its newly elected President Huỳnh Tấn
Mẫm, part of the urban people’s movements emerging in many cities of South
Vietnam in the wake of the 1968 Tết Offensive. Thus, Vietnamese participation in
the 1970 events was, in a sense, more comprehensive.
3. Half a century
after the PPT events, relations between Vietnam and the United States, especially
between the people of the two countries, have gone a long way. Yet, there
remains much that could and should be done, and I think both of us Vietnamese
and Americans are to uphold the spirit of the 1970s and make further
contributions in the new situation.
4, Following the
1970 PPT events, the Paris Agreements were signed in 1973, and peace was
actually materialized in 1975. Forty six years have elapsed since, but multiple
consequences of the war still remain. There are millions of Vietnamese victims
of the dioxin-laden Agent Orange who need support. There are thousands and
thousands of landmines and other Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) that need removal.
And there is the peace that all of us made contributions for its return that is
still not fully free from threats. All this, I believe, requires of us veterans
further efforts, to be joined by others from younger generations.
Thank you./.
On the 50th anniversary of the People’s
Peace Treaty
between US and Vietnamese students
by HUYNH TAN MAM
As you know, peace and patriotism have been part of the one thousand
years of Vietnamese tradition, that is what drives us to fight against foreign
invasion.
This tradition has won the support of all Vietnamese, when Geneva
Agreement of 1954 was signed to end the war with French colonialists. However
when the US entered and supported the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and
successive regimes of military commandants that they created to to dishonour
the Agreement, not respecting the self determination of the Vietnamese people,
its military intervention, waging war and death in VN contradicted the deepest
aspirations of our people, hence we all stood to fight for our independence.
The historical
circumstances
Following the general attack of 1968 by the armies of North VN and
the NLF right into Saigon, the capital of South Viet Nam, the government of SVN
decreed a total draft in South VN, all young men of 18 years up have to enlist
to serve in the army, university students will have military training on
campus, to form the armed forces to protect the capital.
That led to a revolt from the Student Union who quickly called upon
all students unions througout South VN, Hue, Can Tho and all High School
students, to unite and demonstrate, refusing militarization and armed training.
The Student Union allied with the community organizations also to create a
Committee to defend people’s rights for self determination.
This was an opportunity for the government to brutally repress the
opposing movement. Subsequently, in 1969 many student leaders, including myself
who as elected president of Saigon Student Union. We was arrested, tortured and
imprisoned.
Students accross South VN demonstrated even more fiercely, asking
for the withdrawal of American forces from Viet Nam, and statements and calls
were sent via the press to many international organisations in the US, France,
Japan, Canada, Holland around the world to ask for support. Students were
immediately suspected and banned from any traveling out of the country where
they can meet with students of the world to create a stronger movement.
In front of such brutal repression from the Saigon government, US
students applied to come and see the reality and join forces with VNese
students to call for an end of the war were also banned from coming. But the
government did release us Mam and the student leaders in April 1970.
US students were officially banned from entrance to VN, so they had
to go to through tourist visas to plan to come to VN via Laos, to overcome the
barriers.
On June 30, 1970 we had secretly asked the patriarch Thiên Hoa of An
Quang pagoda to host this international student conference, while we organized
another at the School of Agriculture. Charles Palmer with his student
delegation came, and together with us led a demonstration to the American
Embassy that drew thousands of people on the street with the paper doves as
symbols of peace and red coffins as the symbols of death and destruction caused
by the war. The demonstration was repressed with firehoses, tear gas and
Charles Palmer and his US delegation was expelled from Viet Nam.
Following US student unions presidents David Ifshin and E.
Tebankin continue to send support to us
via the press.
December 1-1970
Students of South Vn declaring on peace in VN
Students of Saigon, Van Hạnh, Hue, Can Tho, Dalat and High School
Student Union got together to draft a peace statement with 4 points: the
goverment of South VN has to be self determined by the people, US and allied
forces need to withdraw from VN
December 17-1970 Peace
declaration between US, Hanoi and NLF
students in VN in Hanoi
An American delegation of 15 representatives led by David Ifshin
signed a statement of peace, with Do Van Hien, president of Hanoi Student Union
and Nguyen thi Chau, president of NLF student. The main point was immediate
withdrawal of US and allied forces from VN, end of support to Nguyen van
Thieu’s government, and respect of independence, peace and neutralism of Lao
and Kampuchia.
August 2-1971 Peace
Treaty signed in Saigon between representatives of South VN Student Union
and US delegation
An American delegation led by David Dull, Scientist George Wall,
1967 Nobel Prize recipient in Physics and Medicine, with delegates of Saigon,
Van Hanh, Can Tho, Hue and High School Student Union signed together a
statement to end the war and bring peace to VN.
Students who
supported the South VN governement in protest
Some students who supported the government of South VN declared that
this is indeed a treaty orchestrated, manipulated by the Communist. The
government immediately carried out a whole raid to arrest all students
activists, in order stem out, extinguish the movement before the Paris Peace
Treaty. Hundred of us were arrested as a result, interrogated and imprisoned
end of 1971.
1970-1971:
Nixon, Discord, and the US Withdrawal from Vietnam
Texas Tech Conference: April 9-10, 2021
The People’s Peace Treaty
Doug Hostetter
The People’s Peace Treaty was the only joint antiwar activity which was done in collaboration between the US peace movement, the South Vietnamese peace movent and the friendship and solidarity movement in North Vietnam.
1970-1971 were difficult years for the War in Vietnam and years of growing strength in the antiwar movement in the US. There were Vietnam Moritorium marches across the country and around the world in October, 1969, and the in November, 500,000 people participated in the Moratorium March on Washington, the largest antiwar demonstration in the history of the US. Despite the unprecedented numbers of demonstrators, and massive response of the police the political response of the Nixon administration was to dig in, and expand the war into Cambodia in the spring of 1970. The invasion of Cambodia resulted in major student demonstrations and sit ins in most US colleges and universities which were further intensified by the killing of students in Jackson State and Kent State Universities by National Guard soldiers. Many US colleges and universities were closed down by demonstrations, teach-ins or student occupations, and numerous schools had to close for the semester without giving final examinations that semester.
The US peace movement by this time had also reached out to the Vietnamese peace movement in South Vietnam and to the friendship and solidarity movement in North Vietnam. By the spring of 1970 American peace activist who had visited with student activist in Saigon came back with a proposal from the Saigon Student Union, that students in Saigon, the US and Hanoi should cooperate to develop a People’s Peace Treaty that would point a viable way to end the ongoing deadly war. The proposal was accepted, and at the August 1970 Congress of the US National Student Association (NSA) at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, it was decided NSA world send a delegation of students from US colleges and universities to meet with students from South (Republic of Vietnam, RVN) and students from North Vietnam (DRVN) to develop the treaty. The NSA committed itself to recruiting a geographically, racially and gender diverse group of student body presidents and campus newspaper editors for the delegation which was to travel to South and North Vietnam in December. On November 1st, Larry Magid, a NSA staff member from the national office in Washington, flew to Paris with a letter from Rennie Davis (a prominent antiwar activist and one of the members of the Chicago 7 trial) to Mme Binh. The letter introduced Larry Magid, and asked for Mme Binh’s support of this effort. The letter stated in part, “When I was last in Paris, I discussed with you an idea of a citizen’s “peace treaty,” a kind of joint communique signed by Vietnamese and Americans outlining the correct steps for ending the war. The concept of a citizen’s peace treaty is gaining enormous support in the United States.”
The NSA recruited 14 person delegation of student body presidents and campus newspaper editors from colleges from across the US for the trip to Saigon and Hanoi. Initially, the US State Department was supportive of the effort and assured visas would be issued by South Vietnam so that the group could meet with students from the Saigon Student Union. The supportive response from the US Government ment quickly cooled when the State Depart learned that North Vietnamese had agreed to issue visas for the delegation to visit students in the North.
I was not a part of the original 14 person NSA delegation, but had been recruited as a 15th member because I was a graduate student and fluent in Vietnamese. I was a conscientious objector, who had chosen to do my alternative service in Vietnam, in the middle of the war zone, working for the Mennonite Central Committee doing literacy work with refugee children who had lost their schools due to the war. By the time I was recruited, NSA realized that the State Department no longer supported the trip, so my name was left off delegation lists given to the press. I left for Saigon a week before the official NSA delegation, and was able to enter South Vietnam without problems, while the listed NSA delegats, were all denied visas when they tried to enter Saigon.
I applied for a visa as a Sociologist (which I was) on vacation (which I was), and had no difficulties at immigration at the Tan Son Nhat Airport in Saigon. I was warmly welcomed by Huynh Tan Mam, President of the Saigon Student Union, and his colleagues at the Student Union. They had known that the US NSA was coming, and they were eager to work with us in implementing a People’s Peace Treaty. We had only cordial meetings in their small Student Union office, far from the campus, in one of the poorer sections of town. I also took the opportunity to visit Mennonite friends in Saigon, and return to Tam Ky in Central Vietnam, to visit with Vietnamese friends and colleagues from the years I had worked there with the Mennonite Central Committee. When I returned to Saigon, Huynh Tan Mam indicated that we needed to hold a press conference, before I left to announce the People’s Peace Treaty. I remember responding, “Sure, we could hold a press conference, but if we did, I would likely disappear after entering customs at the Saigon Airport to fly to Bangkok the following day.” “But I know the US and Saigon governments,” Huynh Tan Mam said, “if we don’t hold a press conference with you here, they will deny that you were ever here, or that the Saigon Student Union was involved in negotiating this treaty. They will say that the People’s Peace Treaty was completely drafted and signed only in Hanoi.” After some discussion, it was decided that we would hold a secret press conference before I left, inviting only one trusted Vietnamese and one international journalist who would both agree to hold the story until I had cleared customs and left Vietnam. I don’t recall who the Vietnamese journalist was, but I do remember that the students invited Dan Sotherland from the Christian Science Monitor as a trustworthy US journalist.
The secret press conference went well, and I had no trouble passing customs at Tan Son Nuit Airport the next day on my way to Bangkok. The flight to Bangkok and connecting flight to Vientiane, Laos went smoothly. I had a few day layover to get my visa to Hanoi and catch the once a week Areoflot flight from Moscow that stopped in Vientiane on its way to Hanoi. The one thing that we had not considered, was that the CIA would pick up the article from the Vietnamese press. When I landed in Vientiane I dropped my luggage at my hotel, and headed for the bar in the Hotel Constellation, the press watering hole in Vientiane, where I had planned to meet a friend from Dispatch News Service. He saw me as soon as a I entered, and rushed over to tell me that the Lao Police had been at the bar an hour earlier, and had gone up to the bar and approached one of the members of our delegation who had been turned away in Saigon, and was waiting to travel the next day with me to Hanoi, and asked him if he was Doug Hostetter. And when he had said, “no,” they asked to prove it with his passport. “They are looking for you, so if you are carrying anything that you would not like them to find, I would recommend that you get rid of it right away.” I quickly returned to the hotel and retrieved the signed copy of the People’s Peace Treaty, and brought it back and gave it to my journalist friend asking him to keep it secure and give it to me the following morning before my flight to Hanoi. He agreed, we had a beer and a quick catch up before I returned to my hotel. I wasn’t back in my room more than 15 minutes before there was a loud knock on the door and four Lao police were asking to enter and search my luggage for “illegal document.” It was a bit awkward for everyone. I had removed only the People’s Peace Treaty, but had left all of my documents about the various governmental peace proposals, background materials for the trip and articles about Vietnam and the peace negotiations taking place in Paris. My materials were all in English and Vietnamese, and the four Lao Police spoke only broken English, no Vietnamese, and did not know exactly what they were looking for. They explained that we would need to wait for English and Vietnamese translators to help them go over the materials in my briefcase, but they could lock the materials in their safe, and we could all go out to dinner while we awaited the translators. I remember it was a sumptuous dinner in Vientiane’s best restaurant. When we returned to the locked safe with my briefcase, I noticed that the materials in the briefcase were not in the order in which we had left them, but decided not to mention it. Among the suspicious documents that they selected to take for further inspection were: The DRVN (North Vietnam) Peace Proposal, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (the government of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front) Peace Proposal, (even they knew that the US Government Peace Proposal was not worth further study), military post cards that I had bought in the PX in Saigon, and my copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s, Soul on Ice. After a complete search of my room (which included taking apart my ballpoint pen to look for a secret message inside), the police Lt. Col. who was in charge of the investigation stood up and announced proudly in broken English, “We search just like they do in the United States, I was trained in Fort Bragg!”
The next day I was met at the airport by my journalist friend who returned the signed copy of the People’s Peace Treaty to me shortly before the flight to Hanoi. I North Vietnam I was warmly welcomed by the other 14 members of the People’s Peace Treaty delegation. Part of the group had traveled directly to Hanoi, but the members of the delegation, who had tried to travel to South Vietnam, were refused entry at the Saigon Airport, and placed on the next flight to Bangkok. They had then flown to Vientiane and Hanoi, arriving there a week before me. We were also welcomed by the “Viet – My,” the Vietnamese American Friendship Organization which had been welcoming US peace movement activist in Hanoi since the early 1960’s, and the Vietnam National Student Union (North Vietnamese Student Union). The Northern students were very interested in seeing the South Vietnamese draft Treaty, and asked many questions about the Saigon Student Union, and the peace movement in the Vietnamese cities in the South. The draft treaty from the North was almost identical to that of the South, except that the North had wanted to include a section which required the US to also leave Laos and Cambodia. I had missed a week of activities for our delegation while I had been in South Vietnam, but was there for a visit with the War Crimes Committee that introduced us to some of the weapons used by the US military in Vietnam, the cluster bombs in which a ‘mother bomb” releasee hundreds of small antipersonnel bombs which exploded on impact spewing small metal fragments, or even more troubling, hard plastics that can penetrate the body, but do not register on X-rays. We were also introduced to the new, improved napalm, which burns even hotter than the original napalm. We also learned about Agent Orange, the herbicide, contaminated with dioxin (one of the toxic substances known to man) sprayed widely in South Vietnam by the US Air Force to defoliate trees to deprive guerrillas of cover. We visited the Banci Hospital which had a section devoted to the care of people from the South who had been exposed to Agent Orange. We met with Dr. Nguyen Xuan Huyen, the North Vietnamese Dr. who dedicated his life to treating the victims of Agent Orange. He introduced us to three of his patients all three were from villages in the South, and two of the three had been sprayed directly when they were pregnant, and the third was never sprayed directly, but lived for 4 years in an area that had been heavily sprayed. All three women had seriously deformed children, even though none of them had a history of deformities in their families, and one of the women had had two healthy, normal children before the war started. Dr. Huyen gave me slides of chromosomes of several of his patients which indicated that Agent Orange/Dioxin not only caused deformities in children of mothers who had been exposed, but also deformed the chromosomes to the patient which meant that the deformity would be passed on to the next generation. When I returned to New York, I gave the slides a graduate student friend of mine who shared the slides with his professors in biochemistry at Columbia University. He reported that his professors had looked at the slides, and had agreed that it would be disastrous if it were documented that Agent Orange/Dioxin was mutagenic, but that making slides of chromosomes is a very difficult technical process, and that Western scientists would never accept as valid any slides of chromosomes done in North Vietnam.
We also had time to visit the scenic Ha Long Bay, off of the eastern coast where clusters of small mountains emerge from the bay, almost like the humps of dragons swimming in the sea, visit the Lake of the Returned Sword in the center of Hanoi, where several years later US pilots would be rescued after parachuting from their wounded B-52’s during Nixon’s Christmas Bombing of 1972. Several times during our visit, we had the amazing experience of being rushed by our Vietnamese hosts into a nearby bomb shelter as American bombers passed over head on bombing raids, which fortunately were always targeting other locations.
After our formal signing of the People’s Peace Treaty with the head of the US NSA, the head of the Vietnam National Student Union (North Vietnamese Student Union), and a young woman who was the head of the South Vietnamese Liberation Student Union, we were all invited to meet with the North Vietnamese Prime Minister, Phan Van Dong. The Prime Minister congratulated us for our efforts, warned us that we must have courage, and perhaps some of us would go to prison for our efforts for the People’s Peace Treaty. (Actually, Huynh Tan Mam, the President of the Saigon Student Union was subsequently arrested by the Saigon government and spent two years in Cu Chi prison in Saigon.) He ended our time together saying, “We are all human, we have the same feelings. . . There is no longer space that separates us, satellites travel around the world in 90 minutes. Why can’t we all be friends?”
We were worried about how the US government would react to our announcement that we had signed a People’s Peace Treaty between students in the US, Students in Saigon, students in Hanoi, and even students who were living in the parts of South Vietnam that were controlled by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. We decided that the safest thing would be for us to come home from Vietnam via the Aeroflot flight from Hanoi to Moscow (a 23 hour flight on a Russian turpo-prop, with stops in the capitals of many of the Republics of the USSR along the way). From Moscow we would fly to Paris where we would hold a press conference the following day, announcing to the world that we had a peace treaty between the US and the Vietnam that had been negotiated by US and North and South Vietnamese students which could serve as a model for our governments to make peace.
As students we were proud that we had successfully accomplished our task, despite considerable efforts of the US and South Vietnamese government to block our efforts. When we arrived in Paris we were met by several experienced organizers who had helped to prepare the way, and guide the effort along the way. Reny Davis and John Froins, both made famous by the Trial of the Chicago 7 for their protest of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. The “movement heavies” were not impressed with our treaty, and immediately realized that the treaty wording which we had come back with was full of anti-imperialist rhetoric, which likely felt good to all of us students, but which would make the “treaty” unusable for the broad organizing effort that they had envisioned for the People’s Peace Treaty. I remember that they spent the entire night, revising the treaty in a way that kept all of our original political points, but phrased it in language which they knew would enable the treaty to be an document accessible to the broad US audience, and enable it to become the broad organizing tool which could enable average Americans to realize that there was a viable option for peace with Vietnam and ending the Vietnam War. Once they had settled on suitable language for the treaty, they then had to spend the rest of the evening meeting with diplomats from the DRVN (North Vietnamese) Embassy and from the PRG Embassy (Government of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam) to make sure that those governments understood why we had decided that the wording needed to change, and that they felt comfortable that the revised wording did not change the underlying meaning or politics of the document we had originally drafted. By morning agreement had been reached, and we went ahead and presented to the world press the revised wording as the People’s Peace Treaty.
The timing was perfect, as US colleges and universities were teaming with students who were worried that they would soon graduate and be drafted into a deadly war that they felt was wrong, and a cause for which they certainly did not wish to give their lives. By March there were People’s Peace Treaty offices in 12 cities, student body presidents in hundreds of US colleges and Universities has signed the treaty, and in the 10 schools where there had been a campus-wide referendum, it had passed in every one.
The treaty also quickly moved beyond the National Student Association and US campuses with major antiwar organizations across the country endorsing the treaty and using it with their own constituency. Among the organizations which endorsed and used the treaty were: American Friends Service Committee, Chicago Peace Council, Clergy and Layman Concerned about Vietnam, Los Ageneles Peace Action Council, National Lawyers Guild, New University Conference, Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace.
Prominent members of the US cultural, academic and religious community endorsed the People’s Peace Treaty and allowed their names to be used to further publicize the treaty.
African American leaders like Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Congressman Herman Badillo. Julian Bond, Congressman John Conyers, Ericka Higgins and Bobbie Seale.
Religious leaders like Rabbi Belfour Brickner, Rev. Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Malcolm Boyd, William Sloane Coffin, Robert MacAfee Brown, Bishop Robert DeWitt, Bishop William Davidson, Bishop Paul Moore, Bishop Tomas Gunbleton, Richard McSoreley, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, Father James Groppi, Sister Margaret Traxler and Sister Joques Egan.
Cultural figures like Judy Collins, Jules Feiffer, Jane Fonda, Betty Friedan, Mitchell Goodman, Cleve Gray, Francine du Plessix Gray, Dick Gregory, Julie Harris, Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Denise Levertov, Robert Jay Lifton, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Kate Millett, Grace Paley, Gloria Steinem, I.F. Stone, Paul Sweezy, Bert Schneider, Benjamin Spock, Studs Terkel and Dalton Trumbo.
Prominent academics like Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Kenneth Kenniston, Salvatore Luria, Ashley Montagu, Eric Segal and George Wald.
And of course, there were the leaders of the antiwar movement including Timothy Butz, Kay Camp, Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Fernandez, David Hawk, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Al Hubbard, William Kunstler, Stewart Meacham, Sidney Peck, Amy Swerdlow, Cora Weiss and George Wiley.
There were also the union activists including Abe Feinglass, Henry Foner, Mo Foner and Patrick Gorman.
By the end of April, US Representatives Abzug, Badillo, Chishom, Clay, Conyers, Dellums, Mitchell and Scheuer had introduced into the US Congress a Concurrent Resolution:
“Expressing the sense of the Congress with respect to the People’s Peace Treaty
Whereas the efforts to attain a negotiated settlement of the Indochina conflict at
the Paris Peace Talks have been unsuccessful for many months; and
Whereas a direct equitable solution to the war is now possible; and
That it is the sense of the Congress that the People’s Peace Treaty embodies the legitimate aspirations of the American and Vietnamese peoples for an enduring and just peace in Indochina.” 4/29/71
On January 27, 1973, just over two years after the People’s Peace Treaty was negotiated, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho signed the Paris Peace Accords in Paris which formally ended the US direct involvement in the Vietnam War. They were both awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, although Le Duc Tho declined to accept it. The Paris Peace Accords, like the People’s Peace Treaty called for an immediate ceasefire, withdrawl of US troops from Vietnam, the release of prisoners of war, and for the Vietnamese to form a government without US interference.
When the People’s Peace Treaty was signed at the end of December 1970, there were about 44,000 Americans listed as killed or missing in action in Vietnam. Today there are just over 58,000 names of Americans listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. Had the US government accepted the People’s Peace Treaty in early 1971, 14,000 Americans and hundredcs of thousands of Vietnamese would still be alive today.
