UNITED NATIONS: Borderline Cases

Early last week Dr. Ting-fu Tsiang, Nationalist China’s representative on the U.N. Security Council, lost patience with Russia’s Jacob Malik. The Russian representative, snapped Dr. Tsiang one day last week, “spends much of his superabundant energy in trying to prove to us that black is white and that white is black.” Malik’s retort made spectators grin: Tsiang’s reference to black & white was “an insult to 14 million Negroes in the U.S.” He added heavily: “White men, too, may have a black conscience and a black soul.”

For two days Malik, consistently approaching the same standard of irrelevance, belabored the Council with repetitions of Chinese Communist claims that U.S. planes had carried out ‘Barbarous . . . bombing attacks” on the Chinese side of the Korean-Manchurian border (TIME, Sept. 11). But when U.S. Representative Warren Austin proposed that a U.N. commission investigate the bombings, Malik vetoed the motion.

This week the focus of U.N. activity shifts to the General Assembly in its fifth session in New York’s Flushing Meadows Assembly hall. Here Russia’s first objective is to get the Assembly to oust Chinese Nationalist representatives, replace them by Chinese Communists.

The Assembly’s agenda includes: ¶ Election of a new Assembly president. ¶ Election of the U.N. secretary general. Trygve Lie is likely to be reelected. ¶ Nationalist China’s charges that Russia aggressively aided the Chinese Communists in their revolt against Chiang Kaishek. This may raise the issue of Formosa’s present status. In the Security Council, Warren Austin has already requested an investigation of Communist charges that the U.S. has invaded Formosa.

The Korean war will certainly come up for full-dress debate. Unless North Korean troops stage a comeback, the U.N. will probably be faced with the question of whether its forces are to occupy Korea north of the 38th parallel. Representatives of some nations which have so far supported U.N. action in Korea may propose that U.N. forces be halted at the old border.

The U.S. is in a position to remind them that such action would permit the North Koreans to get ready for another invasion. The U.S. can and probably will argue for the unification of the Korean Republic—which will mean the destruction of Communist control north of the 38th parallel.