The Conference continued in earnest. Apart from the plenary sessions and the sub-committees’ sessions, there were several exchanges in the lobbies — Max André, Messmer, Bousquet and, sometimes, even d’Argenlieu joined in these informal talks. However, no progress was made in the negotiations as regards the questions at issue.
Our delegation’s single-mindedness was apparent in all the discussions. Nguyen Tuong Tam alone stayed away from most of the sessions and seldom took part in the consultations among our delegates.
The question of the ceasefire dragged out over several sessions. The conference’s atmosphere became stifling. The French side knew for sure that we would not give up. Our firm and well-reasoned dealing with the question of the Nam Bo ceasefire drove the French into a difficult siuation. Bousquet, an economic specialist on Indochina, had to admit: “This question caused us no end of trouble. They (i.e. the Vietnamese side) were in the right.” A few other French shared Bousquet’s opinion.
After the first sessions, the Dalat people began to grumble about the French side’s absurd arguments. A French delegate even said: “You have redoubtable dialecticians in your delegation”.
The French could not find any excuse for rejecting our request but they were still unwilling to put the issue on the agenda. Clearly, the French were not anxious for a ceasefire in Nam Bo.
Now a question arose within our delegation: Was it worthwhile to continue the negotiations?
On April 23, the two delegations held a plenary session. Again, we raised the question of a ceasefire in Nam Bo. The French made a concession... They proposed to set up a limited mixed Commission, comprising persons who were not members of either delegation here, to bring about a ceasefire in Cochinchina and, at the same time, to solve other urgent problems. This Commission would convene first in Dalat, and later in Hanoi.
We knew this was simply an attempt at procrastination. But it was thanks to this concession by the French that the negotiations could continue.
Late in April, General Juin, the French army Chief of Staff dropped in on the Dalat conference on his way back to Paris from Nanking. I met him for about twenty minutes and made my position clear to him:
“The French must put into effect a ceasefire in Nam Bo in accordance with the spirit of the Agreement. Otherwise, the Vietnamese people will continue to fight to the end. I want to tell you that, in the name of the resistance.”
Heated debate occurred not only in the political sub-committee, but also in all other sub-committees, military, economic and cultural.
On economic matters, we stood firmly for the preservation of our fundamental economic interests to ensure a favourable development of the national economy. At the same time we made certain concessions to French economic interests in Indochina.
The problems to be handled by this sub-committee were:
— Customs
— Currency
— The existing French business enterprises in our country.
Big differences of opinion centered around the currency problem and the problem of French business undertakings in Viet Nam.
On culture, the two sides reached some agreement. But we disapproved of the French request to set up in Indochina a number of cultural centers under the Federation’s direct control and the French proposal to use French as the second official language after Vietnamese.
On the military issue, several exchanges of opinions failed to bring about any result. For this was dependent on the political issue and no military agreement was possible as long as the political problem remained unsettled.
The political issue was the fundamental and the most arduous and time-consuming problem throughout the negotiations.
Our principled position was: Viet Nam must be a free country. The Indochinese Federation would be of an economic character and should not be allowed to be detrimental to the fundamental rights of Viet Nam.
On the relationship between the countries of the Indochinese Federation and France, our delegation declared the ending of the governor generalship. We advocated organizing a federation which would be, in fact, solely economic. The French representative in the Federation would work as a diplomatic officer. The Indochinese Federation would ordinate the customs and currency policies, and the planning of construction works among the Federation countries on the principle of respect for their sovereignty.
The French side wanted the French High Commissioner to be representative of the French Union and, at the same time, President of the Indochinese Federation. They demanded that legislation, foreign trade, finance, foreign exchange, transport, health, research and invention, culture, science, economics, the statistics service, post, telecommunications and radio, and immigration be all under Federal control... The French thus revealed beyond any doubt their design to revive the former Governor General’s rule.
The French requested that we recognize the manifesto concerning the rights of citizens within the French Union. We favoured the democratic principles in the manifesto but refused to recognize it as yet. Even the French people had not yet recognized this manifesto. And in fact, the French side had no definite idea as to what the French Union they proposed would be like.
On foreign affairs, our position was that Viet Nam would have its own Ambassador to France and the French High Commissioner here would be the diplomatic representative of France in Viet Nam. A free Viet Nam would have the right to appoint its ambassadors to the countries within the French Union and to other countries. The French wanted the representative of France in Viet Nam to be a French official appointed by the French High Commissioner, and Viet Nam to have diplomatic representation in other countries only through the French Union.
As regards Nam Bo, the March 6 Preliminary Agreement had provided for the holding of a referendum to settle the question. Our stand was: the objective of a ballot was not to ascertain who should have sovereignty over Nam Bo, because the Vietnamese territory was made up of all the three ky, North, Centre and South. The referendum was in order to ask the Southern people whether they wanted to remain a ky in the framework of a unified Viet Nam. But the French wished the referendum to deal with the question of Vietnamese sovereignty over the southern part of Viet Nam, Nam Bo, formerly Cochinchina.
In our opinion, and as a matter of course, a referendum needed to be held in Nam Bo only. But the French demanded also a referendum in Trung Bo, formerly Annam, and Bac Bo, formerly Tonkin, about sovereignty over these two ky.
We held that, to ensure the legality and equity of the referendum, genuine freedom for the voters was indispensable. Therefore, we proposed that a temporary administration represented by a thirty-member council be set up in Nam Bo. This council would elect an executive committee whose task would be: to bring into effect within a short time a strict ceasefire, to release all political prisoners, to put an end to all terrorization and to ensure freedom of action for the people’s political organizations. The French side replied in ambiguous terms that they would ensure freedom for the referendum in Cochinchina, and that they did not approve of Vietnamese participation in the present administration in Cochinchina.
A big gap remained between our position and that of the French. To all appearances, the representatives of the new France who took part in the negotiations lagged far behind the actual situation brought on by the fundamental changes that had taken place on this peninsula. Their mentality remained, to a large extent, that of the old-fashioned colonialists of the French Empire. Max André, head of the French delegation, increasingly revealed himself as a diehard reactionary. Once, in a reception, he said: “France has been very generous to Viet Nam. She has made too many concessions already. We can’t have another Munich here.”
Meanwhile, in France, on these first days of May, the new draft constitution was rejected in a referendum. This was another setback for the movement of struggle for democratic liberties in France. The rightists had scored a success. The French reactionaries in the colonies would become even more aggressive. Our struggle would be even more arduous.
On May 10, another plenary session was held. We stuck to our position on the holding of a referendum in Nam Bo. The French delegates remained obdurate. We told them outright that some Frenchmen nurtured a design to sever Cochinchina from Viet Nam; this design could not be tolerated and would certainly fail. After a heated debate, our delegation got up and left the conference room.
That night, after a consultation within the delegation, I sat up late. It was murky outside the window. The lake and the mountains could no longer be discerned. The lovely pine hills and the wild woods of Lang Biang plateau were blurred in the darkness. The resistance waged by our people and our guerrilla fighters from those distant mountain peaks and dense jungles was going on and could not yet come to an end. Since the beginning, we had made regular reports to Uncle Ho and other comrades on developments at the conference. Our press and radio had kept the public informed of our delegation’s struggle at the conference. Uncle Ho and the comrades at home were closely watching the progress of the negotiations. In the session this morning, I had said to the French delegation: “The Vietnamese combatants, who have gone through untold hardships in the struggle for the freedom of their nation, can only accept peace in justice and honour... In the name of a nation which has been tempered in labour and struggle for thousands of years I can assure you that, so long as Nam Bo is separated from Viet Nam, every Vietnamese will struggle his utmost to bring it back to the bosom of the Fatherland. If our voice finds no response and the Agreement is not respected, we shall not be responsible for anything that may happen later on... History will testify to the truth of our words...” We had told the French all that was necessary to tell. But the French still clung to their colonialist stand. We were now able to make a better assessment of the frenzied opposition by the reactionaries. The negotiations brought home to us a truth: in a just struggle for independence and freedom for one’s country, diplomatic activities invariably depended on the people’s might. It was indispensable for every Vietnamese to have sufficient energy and determination to raise his own might. Our people had to be strong. Our country had to be strong. Diplomatic activities must stem from that basis. Once, I recalled, Uncle Ho had said: “Strength is like a gong and diplomatic activities may be likened to its sound; a loud sound can only come from a big gong.”
The session this morning became the last one of the Dalat conference. However, this was but a preparatory negotiation held on the spot. The link between us and the French had not been completely cut off.