_@ft to right: Rae Murphy, Maurice Rush, Tim Buck and Ho Chi Minh.

VIETNAM
TODAY —

Canadian eyewitness report

| Last month a delegation of
1e Canadian Communist Party

dent more than two weeks.

1 North Vietnam. It included
im Buck, national chairman
f the party, Rae Murphy, edi-
or of Scan, and Maurice Rush,
ssociate editor of the Pacific
ribune. Besides its stay in
-anoi, where it was able to
sit theatres, museums and
.ctories, the delegation toured
ie countryside and visited vil-
ges and collective farms. It
sited a coal-mining area near
e port of Haiphong, which
as bombed by the United
ates a few aye later. The

Canadians had extensive dis-
cussions with Ho Chi Minh,
president of Vietnam, and with
Le Duan, first secretary of the
Vietnam Workers Party. It
met Pham’ Van Dong, Vo

Nguyen Giap and other govern-.

ment and party personalities.
The following is the first ex-
tensive report-back of the
Canadian delegation. It is taken
from interviews with Mur-
phy and Buck by the Tribune,
and from a press conference
held in Toronto. (Mr. Rush,
who resides in Vancouver, was
not available to these inter-
views).

You have just returned from Hanoi. What is it
like in that city? What about defense prepara-
tions? Does it seem like a wartime city?

Murphy: No, except that there are few children and
old people. You notice that when you come in, The —
city is quiet. Many people have been evacuated. —
Those who live there now are people who are -ab-

solutely necessary fom production. Even in the mu- —

seums the most valuable things have been evacuated.
They’re evacuating factories. Some places have been
sand-bagged and there are anti-aircraft installations.

But the atmosphere in Hanoi doesn’t seem like
wartime. And super-nationalism is completely absent.
I was surprised at that: no anti-Americanism.- They
have an amazirig appreciation of the peace move-
ment in the United States, quite a balanced view I
thought.

Buck: We found out, everywhere we went, that there
is no fear among the people. We quickly came to:
realize that one of the reasons is that they were all

involved up to the neck in the war against the French a

from 1946 to 1954. They fought the French to 4a
Standstill, and the French army surrendered. They
assumed, having won their independence, and on the

basis of a World-War-Two pledge by President Roose- q

velt, that they should enjoy their independence.

They are absolutely certain the Americans cannot
win the war, even if they destroy all the big indus- —
tries. They are passionately determined that they will
not negotiate the status of Vietnam. Vietnam is in-
dependent. It will .remain independent and the only
way this ‘can be changed will be by such military
force that there will be nobody left to resist.

The United States cannot destroy Vietnam without
spreading the war to other parts of Asia, and the
U.S. cannot win a war in Asia.

The Vietnamese say it is as simple as.that.
Did you travel much outside of Hanoi?

Murphy: Yes, we didn’t go to Haiphong; but we were
very close. We were near the thermal station the
Americans bombed recently. We went to the mining
area at Ha Long Bay. we visited villages and collec-
tive farms.

Is the bombing affecting morale in the North?

Murphy: It’s heightening the morale. They say that
in the areas that are the hardest hit the production
per person has gone up. And you could see the tre-
mendous elan of the people in the hard-hit areas.

Vietnam doesn’t have a sophisticated economy and
bombing communications is not really going to da-
mage it. The villages are almost complete economic
units, self-sustaining. But the factories they bomb
out—it’s a horrible thing. They’ve been built on pa-
‘tience and time. The North has a machine-tool in-
dustry. Bombing will set this back.

Buck: We visited a textile mill in Nam Binh. It pre-
viously employed 20,000 workers but the number has
now been reduced to 10,000. Gver 100 machines in
the plant have been either destroyed or damaged;
1,142 houses have been destroyed; 30 civilians have
been killed and 60 injured.

But the mill is surrounded by rifle pits and by anti-
aircraft emplacements. And they are manned by the
workers of the mill. A majority of the: gun crews
are women, quite young. And they maintain duty 24
hours a day in 4-hour shifts. They do this in addition

to doing their 8 hours of work in the mill per day.

And that mill fulfilled its production quota for 1965
on the 15th of December.

Murphy: This American bombing is crazy. It doesn’t
work, because of the terrain. In one place they drop-
ped 90 bombs trying to get this bridge; it was just
stone and wood, and all around it were huge craters,
really fantastic. You’d think they would have shaken
the damn thing apart. They completely destroyed the
village around the place but the bridge was still
standing.

Buck: The Vietnamese military people explained that
the Americans abandoned their mass bombing and