Parliament Debate On Vietnam

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31082, 10 June 1966, Page 12

Parliament Debate On Vietnam

(N.Z. Press Association) WELLINGTON, June 9. Vietnam occupied Parliament today when the Address-in-Reply debate was resumed.

The two main speakers were Dr. A. M. Finlay (Opp., Waitakere) and Mr D. MacIntyre (Govt., Hastings), who were members of a Parliamentary team that recently visited Vietnam. Mr Maclntyre, the chairman of the Parliamentary Defence Committee, commented on conditions under which New Zealand’s surgical team worked at Qui Nhon. “Undoubtedly, these men and women are doing a magnificent job under conditions which would be shocking and strange to New Zealand,” he said.

Mr Maclntyre said that over the years, New Zealand Parliamentary teams had visited the surgical unit—but added that because of the build-up of refugees and casualties in Qui Nhon the team was now performing 400 operations a month. Referring to the unit’s staff shortage, he suggested members of the team should only serve three months instead of a year—thus encouraging more surgeons and staff to volunteer to work at Qui Nhon Hospital. Commenting on the subject of civilian aid for South Vietnam; Mr Maclntyre said: “People told us they wanted military aid to win the peace. Then, they said, they would like civilian aid. “But we must first win the war,” he said.

Asking if aggression had occurred against South Vietnam, Mr Maclntyre said: “We were told North Vietnamese troops were coming down into South Vietnam—and that the number was increasing each month—and we were told the Viet Cong were launching attacks from across the Cambodian border.”

He said the Parliamentary team had met Viet Cong defectors.

Mr Maclntyre criticised the Deputy Leader of the Oppo-

sition, Mr Hugh Watt, for saying in a recent newspaper article that captured Communist weapons seen by the Parliamentary fact-finding team were all of Second World War vintage. “The member has little experience in assessing weapons because we saw recoilless rifles which were invented in the last war, besides modern rifles and pistols,” said Mr Maclntyre. He said that the Labour Party, with the Federation of Labour, had said it would cease to give military aid to South Vietnam.

It was interesting to see the newspaper reports of the Federation of Labour conference when the Leader of the federation and Dr. A. M. Finlay tried to “leave room for manoeuvre” in their Vietnam policy.

“Are they prepared to let North Vietnam take over this beautiful country of South Vietnam?” he asked. “Everyone talks about the need for peace—we propose to do something about it,” said Dr. Finlay. Labour Party policy was at least two-fold, in addition to a willingness to co-operate with the United Nations.

First, said Dr. Finlay, New Zealand’s combatant participation would! be terminated “as a protest It, and withdrawal from, continued escalation, and all the horror and futility of a so-called military solution.”

Secondly, this would be replaced with constructive civilian aid, which would build up but not tear down, and would leave behind “something of which we can be proud.” Dr. Finlay said everyone agreed that the Vietnam problem was a complex one—but it ill-became the Government to adopt the “arrogant stance” that it had a monopoly on honesty and integrity.

Government members on the fact-finding mission had spoken the truth as they saw it, he continued. “We saw the same thing through different eyes.” The United States authorities said the tide had been turned in South Vietnam, that the military war would not be lost “But - that is a

very different thing from winning the war,” Dr. Finlay said.

He quoted the two alternatives as given in the Mansfield assessment presented recently to Congress. One alternative was passive, the other active and aggressive, purely military. The consequences of the military solution that Senator Mansfield indicated were “merely appalling” and “unimaginably catastrophic,” said Dr. Finlay. He told Parliament that

the South had an over-all superiority today of four to one. Its material superiority was in the neighbourhood of 100 to one.

The United States, however, was not taking real initiative. On the contrary, it was calling for more and more sup port, and was geared up to double its own forces within the year. The only conclusion Dr. Finlay said he could come to was the intention to “blast, burn and starve the enemy

out of its remaining footholds” and to drive what was left over the 17th parallel. “This is the military solution against which the Government, I believe, properly, has set its face.

Dr. Finlay said he believed such a way to military victory would produce “pestilence, starvation, hatred, seared and searing bitterness,” and the very Communism it was designed to uproot. “The war would be won in a military sense but the peace would be lost,” he said.