Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. A. 5.djvu/230

Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011  ""Unity is our invincible force. In order to consolidate the North into a solid base for the struggle to reunify our country, our entire people should be closely and widely united on the basis of the wrker-peasant alliance in the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front. It is all the more necessary for veteran and new cadres of the Party and Government to assume identity of ideas, to be united and single-minded, and to compete to serve the people." 159/"

All through the fall of 1956, with the Party and the government under patent stress, the public statements of the Lao Dong leaders reiterated the theme. At the Tenth PlenU1l1 of t he Central Committee of the Party, in late October, 1956, Truong Chinh, as the proponent of Land Reform, was publicly sacrificed. to "rectification of errors" and to national unity. Vo Nguyen Giap's confessional at the Tenth Plenum took place on 27 October 1956, t he day after Diem promulgated the new Constitution of the Republic of South Vietnam and took office as its first president. North Vietnam's peasant uprisings in November further deepened the contrast between North and South, much to the DRV’s disadvantage internationally. After a fence-mending December, the DRV summoned its National Assembly for one of its rare sessions. The Assembly took cognizance that "the struggle for unity would be long and difficult," and that "consolidation" of the North would have to take priority; on 22 January 1957 it passed a resolution stating that: ""The National Assembly confirms that in 1956, the work of strengthening the North and struggling for national reunification was crowned with great successes, though errors and short-comings still existed in some work. Our successes are fundamental, and will certainly be developed. Our errors and short-comings are few and temporary, and will certainly be removed, and are nml in the process of being overcome." 162,/"

The National Assembly adjourned on 25 January 1957, the day after the Soviets proposed admitting North and South Vietnam to the United Nations as separate, sovereign states --·a move concerning which the DRV evidently had no warning, and W"hich probably dates the nadir of DRV fortunes post-Geneva. 161/ Ho Chi Minh promptly denounced the Soviet action in a message to the UN, but at no time was the DRV more isolated.

It was about this period that mounting dissatisfaction with the Party leaders in South Vietnam began to be felt in Hanoi. Prisoners and documents attest that Ie Duan, the Lao Dong chieftain in South Vietnam, had lost faith in "political struggle" as early as 1955; one source reported that it Vias Le Duan's view that Hanoi was "wasting time," and that the Diem government should. be "forcibly Rh