Paris Peace Accords

The Paris Peace Accords (Vietnamese: Hiệp định Paris về Việt Nam), officially the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam (Hiệp định về chấm dứt chiến tranh, lập lại hòa bình ở Việt Nam), was a peace agreement signed on 27 January 1973 to establish peace in Vietnam and end the Vietnam War. It included a main treaty and accompanying annexes. It was scheduled to take effect at 8:00 AM Saigon time the following day. The agreement was signed by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), and the United States. The PRG represented the Viet Cong (VC, NLF), a South Vietnamese opposition movement de facto controlled by the North. US ground forces had begun to withdraw from Vietnam in 1969, and had suffered from deteriorating morale during the withdrawal. By the beginning of 1972 those that remained had very little involvement in combat. The last American infantry battalions withdrew in August 1972. Most air and naval forces, and most advisers, also were gone from South Vietnam by that time, though air and naval forces not based in South Vietnam were still playing a large role in the war. The Paris Agreement removed the remaining US forces, and direct US military intervention ended. Fighting between the three remaining powers did not stop on 28 January, even for an hour. The agreement was not formally designated a treaty, and President Nixon did not ask the US Senate to ratify it. The negotiations that led to the accord began in 1968, after various lengthy delays. As a result of the accord, the International Control Commission (ICC) was replaced by the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS), which consisted of Canada, Poland, Hungary, and Indonesia, to monitor the agreement. The main negotiators of the agreement were US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese Politburo member Lê Đức Thọ. Both men were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, but Lê Đức Thọ refused to accept it. The agreement contained two notable provisions that represented concessions to both North and South Vietnam: North Vietnamese troops (PAVN) were allowed to remain in the South, and the Republic of Vietnam government in Saigon led by President Thiệu was allowed to continue to exist rather than be replaced by a coalition government. The agreement's provisions were immediately and frequently broken by both North and South Vietnamese forces with no official response from the United States. Open fighting broke out in March 1973, and North Vietnamese offensives enlarged their territory by the end of the year. Two years later, a massive North Vietnamese offensive conquered South Vietnam on April 30, and the two countries, which had been separated since 1954, united once more in 1976, as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Part of the negotiations took place in the former residence of the French painter Fernand Léger; it was bequeathed to the French Communist Party (PCF). The street of the house was named after General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, who had commanded French forces in Indochina from 1945 until July 1946.