Don't Send Us Back

In the first months after V-E Day, the Western allies in Germany, swallowing hard, bundled thousands of unwilling and sometimes struggling refugees from Communist domination into trains, and sent them back to death or slavery in Communist hands. The allies did this wicked thing to prolong the "honeymoon" with Soviet Russia. When Russia itself ended the honeymoon, the practice of involuntary repatriation stopped--to the vast relief of all men of good will.

In Korea last week, another coalition of free nations (including the U.S., Britain, France) was faced with another Communist demand for involuntary repatriation. This time the prospective victims were among the U.N.'s 130,000-odd prisoners of war (of whom about 20,000 are Chinese, the rest North Koreans). At the conference table in Panmunjom, the U.N. insisted that each man be free to accept or reject repatriation, the voting to be supervised by the Red Cross. The Red negotiators insisted that all Communist prisoners be returned to their masters, whether they wanted to go or not. The U.N. Command said that thousands of Red prisoners beg not to be sent back.

Many of the Chinese prisoners want to join the Nationalists on Formosa. Many more, both Chinese and North Korean, know that if returned to Communist control they will be treated as traitors, or at least as suspects contaminated by contact with the free world. There were unconfirmed but plausible stories that some had threatened mass suicide, that others had drawn up petitions signed in blood, that fights rage in the U.N. stockades between Communist and anti-Communist factions.

The U.N. proposal on repatriation was designed to work both ways--i.e., any U.N. prisoners who chose to stay in Communist territory would be free to do so. This did not interest the Red negotiators, and they remained obdurate. The U.N. delegates knew that, in resisting the Red demands, they might prolong the captivity and perhaps endanger the lives of the 11,000-plus U.N. prisoners (3,200 of them Americans) whose names had turned up on the Communist P.W. lists.

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