Paris Peace Accords

Four foreign ministers in Paris

The Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet-Nam was signed in Paris on 27 January 1973 by representatives of the United States, the Republic of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

The signatories were the foreign ministers: William P. Rogers for the United States, Trần Văn Lắm for South Vietnam, Nguyễn Duy Trinh for North Vietnam and Nguyễn Thị Bình for the PRG. Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ, who had done the negotiating, had initialed the completed text on 23 January and were not on the formal signature lines.

Engineered around a refusal

The South Vietnamese government would not recognize either North Vietnam or the PRG. So Rogers signed two nearly identical instruments, and on the four-party version the opposing Vietnamese parties signed separate pages.

The document set a ceasefire for 2400 GMT on 27 January and required the United States to cease military activity against North Vietnam. A sixty-day clock started for the withdrawal of U.S. and specified allied personnel, dismantling of bases, and return of captured military personnel and foreign civilians.

What the signature did not end

Monitoring fell to four-party and two-party joint military commissions plus an International Commission of Control and Supervision made up of Canada, Hungary, Indonesia and Poland.

The listing’s claim that U.S. involvement ended that day is too broad. American forces stayed through the sixty-day withdrawal — the last left on 29 March — and U.S. bombing in Cambodia continued until August 1973.

Nor did the fighting stop. The ceasefire-in-place provisions left large communist formations where they stood without requiring their withdrawal, and Vietnamese fighting continued from the agreement’s opening days.