UNITED NATIONS: Green Is for Hope

Outside the glass tower of the United Nations on Manhattan’s East River, a group of pickets paraded every night last week with outsized flashlights. Periodically they flashed the beams, filtered through translucent green paper, against the walls of the U.N. Assembly building. In Europe, green is a symbol for hope. Inside the U.N., the Eleventh General Assembly had met in special session to talk about Hungary.

The Assembly had already passed eleven resolutions on Hungary, including those condemning Russia’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian rebellion last fall and demanding that the Soviets withdraw. The Soviets ignored them all. But to keep the crime of Hungary before world opinion, the U.S rallied 37 nations to sponsor still another resolution.

U.S. Delegate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. set the tone for the four-day debate by sticking to the abundant facts collected by the U.N. Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary (TIME, July 1). He did not shout or become vituperative; he was not “pursuing this subject in a spirit of cold war”; he argued that “we do not condemn the doer but the deed.” And the reason the subject was introduced again was that Puppet Premier Janos Kadar has kept none of the glib promises he made after Soviet tanks crushed the revolt last November. Soviet troops have not been withdrawn; nor has the promise of no reprisals been honored. From incontrovertible Hungarian Communist sources—their radios and newspapers—Lodge submitted the names of 1,768 Hungarians punished by the regime, including 23 executions and 51 death sentences.

Through this damning factual indictment, Hungary’s chief delegate, Peter Mod, sat impassively. Nor did he answer when the Uruguayan delegate asked him to explain his own “magic metamorphosis” from last October, when Mod himself led a Revolutionary Committee of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry that had demanded “liberation” and condemned Russia’s “unwarranted interference.”

As the debate went on, Burma introduced an amendment to make things a little easier for Hungary’s masters by having the Assembly “deplore” rather than “condemn” Russia, and was joined by Ceylon, Indonesia and India. The General Assembly rejected the amendment and then, by a bigger margin than last December, voted 60 to 10 to condemn Russia’s “continued defiance” of General Assembly resolutions. Yugoslavia was one of the ten Communist nations to side with Russia. Burma in the end voted for the resolution, as did 19 other nations from Asia and Africa. India was among ten that abstained; she may need the help of another Soviet veto in the U.N. Security Council on the Kashmir question.

The resolution named Prince Wan Waithayakon, able and gentle Foreign Minister of Thailand and president of the Eleventh General Assembly, as a special envoy to try to persuade Russia and Hungary to comply with the previous resolutions. Hungary let it be known that he would not be welcome.