Telegram from the Foreign Affairs Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Ung Van Khiem to the Albanian Foreign Affairs Minister Behar Shtylla

This document is a telegram from the Foreign Affairs Minister of North Vietnam Ung Van Khiem to the Albanian Foreign Affairs Minister Behar Shtylla. Van Khiem describes to Shtylla the history of American-Vietnamese relations from the 1954 Geneva Convention until 1961. Van Khiem stresses that the situation in South Vietnam has worsened after President Kennedy took office. During May 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson came to Saigon and discussed with the President of the Republic of Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem the prospect of enlarging American presence in South Vietnam. Since that time the South Vietnamese government, with American support, organized internment camps and a cordon sanitaire in the area of the South Vietnamese borders with Laos and Cambodia. Van Khiem sees these actions as menacing to peace in Indochina, and Southeast Asia more generally. The North Vietnamese government, abiding by the Geneva Convention on Indochina, proposed organizing a conference with the South Vietnamese authorities in order to discuss free elections throughout the country and the reunification of Vietnam. The government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam denounced the American plans to enlarge the scope of aggressive actions in Vietnam and, especially, the plan to deploy the U.S. Army in South Vietnam.