The Battle of Words Continues

Viet Nam has a troop buildup, China shows off some P.O. W.s

To no one's surprise, the March 29 date proposed by Viet Nam for peace talks with China came and went last week without any parley taking place. Hanoi claimed that as many as 10,000 Chinese troops still occupied parts of its border area, and thus refused to discuss peace terms. Peking insisted that it had withdrawn completely from Viet Nam; U.S. analysts accept that statement, but they also believe that the Chinese have slightly altered the old border for tactical military purposes--"a matter of a hundred yards here and a hundred yards there," as one official put it.

A considerably more serious development, in Washington's view, was Viet Nam's continuing troop buildup in its now devastated northern regions, as if in preparation for further fighting. Hanoi has already moved several of its better divisions out of Cambodia to the north. According to Agence France-Presse Correspondent Jean Thoraval, who recently visited Viet Nam's northern frontier, thousands of militiamen and soldiers have taken up positions in the lush valleys and mountains adjoining the 735-mile-long border with China. Thoraval said Vietnamese officials openly predict a resumption of fighting within six months to a year.

Meanwhile, Hanoi for the first time allowed three Soviet warships--a cruiser, a frigate and a minesweeper--to use the American-built naval facilities at Cam Ranh Bay. Soviet ships have also made port calls at Danang, and Vietnamese troops are being flown around the country in Soviet aircraft. Concerned about the fragility of the ceasefire, one Hanoi-based Western diplomat glumly predicts: "I rate the chance of a further round of fighting rather high and very soon."

Whether or not the shooting is resumed, the battle of words between the inimical neighbors apparently will continue. Hanoi offered new allegations of Chinese troop atrocities, including such barbarities as eye-gouging and disemboweling pregnant women. If anything, the clumsiness of Hanoi's propaganda was more than matched by Peking's. In a ham-fisted attempt to make up for lost mileage in the war of credibilities, China last week permitted eleven Western and Japanese correspondents based in Peking to visit its frontier areas, including two camps for Vietnamese P.O.W.s. The carefully stage-managed tour nevertheless went embarrassingly awry, much to the consternation of Chinese officials.

The "Collection Center for Captured Vietnamese," as the Chinese quaintly called the first camp, was located at Baise in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, some 60 miles north of the Vietnamese border. At first sight, reported one of the English-language journalists present, Nigel Wade of the London Daily Telegraph, it resembled nothing so much as a busy secondary school during recess. Prisoners in Chinese-supplied blue suits and caps were playing soccer, badminton and tug-of-war. The food seemed plentiful and nutritious. There was no barbed wire or watchtower, and only one visible armed sentry, at the main gate. The only indication of confinement was a 6-ft.-high brick wall surrounding the camp, which was formerly a training school for Chinese Communist officials.

The tough-talking camp commandant, Wang Xing, said that the 243 prisoners (ten of whom were women) initially were obsessed by fears that they would be executed. But after a month of "studying" Chinese-supplied materials, the prisoners now realized that China had "exercised leniency and decency towards prisoners of war." The commandant said that 30% of the prisoners now agree that Viet Nam had been the "aggressor" in the war, while a further 60% were inclined toward this view. Only 10%, he claimed, were still "stubborn" in their insistence that China was at fault. Some visiting journalists were annoyed at being used to transmit Chinese statements about the prisoners' attitude toward their own country. Wade protested that the Vietnamese would "almost certainly execute or severely punish these prisoners" after they were repatriated. Replied Wang: "I am just telling you the facts. It's up to you what you do with them."

It turned out that the Vietnamese had been subjected to as much as five hours daily of "thought reform." The prisoners were divided into groups of eight, which were isolated from each other except at recreation periods when conversation was forbidden. Despite the massive indoctrination, only a handful of impressionable young recruits were willing to denounce Viet Nam openly as the "aggressor" in the war.

The majority of the P.O.W.s had apparently resisted the brainwashing. At one interview attended by the reporters and 14 senior Chinese army officers, a Vietnamese staff sergeant defiantly denounced "the reactionary Peking clique" and accused China of using "gas" against Vietnamese hiding in caves during the war. "What kind of gas?" asked a reporter. "Poison gas," came the angry and loud reply. At this point pandemonium broke out. A Chinese officer jumped up and bellowed something at the interpreter, who in turn shouted at the Vietnamese sergeant. The reporters were quickly ushered out of the room.

Chinese TV crews frequently shadowed the visiting journalists as they interviewed the Vietnamese, trying to obtain film footage for propaganda purposes. The Vietnamese would often cringe when the TV lights came on, and the reporters shouted for the Chinese camera crews to stop. They did so. Wade, who along with others threatened to leave the tour unless the Chinese stopped filming the correspondents, later wrote that the visit had been "journalistically unsatisfactory and ethically disturbing." That tough judgment may cause the Chinese to pause before making any further attempts to enlist foreigners in their verbal clashes with Hanoi.

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