Call for Unity

Most of Asia's old & new nations have yet to grasp the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin's advice: better to hang together than to hang separately. The Philippines' President Elpidio Quirino, long a stout advocate of a Pacific alliance modeled after NATO, has got nowhere, partly because the U.S. wants to delay such an alliance, and partly because Indonesia's leaders, like India's, still dream of a Third Force position between the Communist and the anti-Communist worlds. Recently, two young Filipino veterans, Jaime Ferrer and Eleuterio Adevoso, had an idea: Why not bring Southeast Asian veterans together as private citizens, bypassing governments? Last week in Manila, 33 delegates and observers, representing the veterans of nine countries from Formosa to Australia, assembled for a discussion of regional security.

Indonesia sent an observer but its neutralism popped up in a wire from Indonesian veterans who urged "an end to big-power intervention in Asia." India and Burma refused to send delegates. The Filipinos did most of the effective talking. Philippine army men got across a series of lectures on how they had tackled the Huk guerrillas. President Quirino spoke up for "collective defense," and Defense Minister Ramon Magsaysay, one of the ablest of Asia's antiCommunists, struck the same theme: "Our government is committed wholeheartedly to alliance with the free nations . . . [against] the immoral concept of might making right."

It was, at best, a modest beginning. But the veterans hope to meet again next year.

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