Britain and the Neutralisation of Laos

Chapter Four. The Co-Chairmen’s Message

Co-Chairmen’s Message 143 CHAPTER FOUR The Co-Chairmen’s Message ‘[W]e have no special interest in Laos: all we want is an agreement which both sides will respect.’ – Fred Warner Ceasefire conditions In Kuznetsov’s absence Roberts had carried out his instructions with Georgi Pushkin, the deputy minister responsible for Southeast Asia, who had just returned from India and Ceylon. He made over the draft texts, offering to include dates, but leaving ‘no doubt about our position on verifying the effectiveness of the cease-fire before the conference could actually meet’. His first impression, Pushkin responded, was ‘that we were somehow still making one measure conditional upon others instead of regarding them all as part of a single continuous process’. Roberts contested that: ‘we were only making one condition, on which we insisted for obvious reasons, i.e. that hostilities should have ceased before the conference actually met’. The main issue he raised was the representation of Laos at the conference should no government of national unity have been formed.1 No doubt the Soviet aim was ‘to put pressure on Viang Chan, through ourselves and the Americans, to throw out Boun Oum and come to terms with Suvanna’.2 Home hoped that the appeal for a ceasefire was not going to be held up by a dispute over representation. If no government had been formed, all parties could be permitted to express their views to the conference . Another alternative: the King could be asked to designate leaders from all groups, including the PL, to go to the conference as a group in order to work out the formation of a new government.3 Roberts might say that, if no government had been formed by the time the conference met, it would itself ‘devise some means whereby all parties will be permitted to express their views’.4 143 144 Britain and the Neutralisation of Laos On 12 April the State Department instructed Thompson to express concern over the delay in the Soviet response.5 Thompson toned the wording down to avoid the suggestion of a threat. Gromyko said the reply would be made soon.6 It was at this point that the MAAG decision was made, though the instructions had not been implemented, and so, if they reflected the US wish to apply a bit of ‘stick’ and get answers that were better and also prompter, they did not affect the SU’s reply. When that reply came, Rusk found it, as expected, inadequate. Gromyko saw Roberts late on 16 April immediately after Suvanna arrived at the airport and handed over an aide-mémoire and redrafts of the ceasefire appeal, the communication to Nehru, and that on the conference. After a ‘hasty reading’, Roberts doubted whether the drafts adequately covered the need to establish a ceasefire before the conference met. Reading them more closely, he found no specific provision for the verification of the ceasefire by the ICC, whose activities and in particular its return to Laos were all made dependent on the decisions of the Co-Chairmen. ‘But I had no opportunity to go into this with Gromyko, who was clearly pressed for time.’ The other issue was the level of representation: the SU wanted it at the ministerial level.7 The aide-mémoire, covering that point, also reaffirmed that the SU considered Suvanna’s the legal government. It insisted, too, that the calling of the conference, the ceasefire, and the renewal of the ICC’s work were ‘an inseparably linked system of arrangements’, about which the Co-Chairmen must simultaneously reach an agreement that had to include the date of the conference.8 The draft Co-Chairmen message on the ceasefire, setting that date as 5 May, called on all parties in Laos to cease fire by that date, called on ‘appropriate representatives to enter into negotiations for concluding agreement on questions connected with cease-fire’, and called on the people of Laos to assist the ICC when it arrived on the Co-Chairmen’s instructions ‘in carrying out tasks of supervision and control of cease-fire’.9 The draft message to India invited it to convene the ICC in Delhi, where it would report on its tasks and functions to the Co-Chairmen. They would consider the report and ‘give it directions on going to Laos to carry out work on controlling cease-fire’.10 A third message invited governments, including that of Laos, to an international conference starting in Geneva on...