Dropping ihe Excess Baggage

Somewhat shaken by British and other foreign reaction to its strong stand at Panmunjom. the U.S. took time out. The U.N. Command first asked for a three-day recess in the truce talks; before this interlude expired, the U.N. took an additional five-day recess. Last week General Harrison, the senior U.N. delegate, conferred again in Tokyo with U.N. Commander Mark Clark, who was receiving instructions from Washington.

One defect in U.N. negotiating technique had become quite plain. This was a tendency to make some demands for bargaining purposes, or to soothe the feelings of South Korea's intransigent Syngman Rhee, without making a sufficiently clear distinction between these demands and those basic questions of principle on which the U.N. was determined not to surrender.

Bargaining Points. For example, to placate Rhee (who kept insisting that he would accept no cease-fire that left enemy soldiers on Korean soil), the U.N. had demanded that 34,000 North Korean prisoners unwilling to accept repatriation be turned loose forthwith, leaving only 14,500 unwilling Chinese to be dealt with. The U.N. had not really expected the enemy to accept this. And the U.N. had illogically demanded that the proposed prisoner commission of five neutral nations should act unanimously--after expressing fears that the Polish and Czech members would wield a veto.

In Washington last week, new proposals were being formulated from which all this excess baggage might be dropped. On four points the U.N. intends to stand firm:

1) No enemy prisoner would be forced to return to Communist control against his will.

2) No enemy prisoner would be forced into indefinite custody as an alternative to repatriation.

3) Communist agents would have access to unwilling prisoners, while under five-nation neutral supervision, but these contacts would be monitored, to forestall coercion or intimidation.

4) No Polish or Czechoslovak troops would set foot on South Korean soil (as guards for the unwilling prisoners).

Give & Take. On other matters there could be give & take. The tentative U.N. proposal was that Indian troops alone would guard the prisoners, that the other four nations would supervise. The U.N. was now willing that a post-truce political conference should discuss the fate of unwilling prisoners, but not endlessly: there would be a cutoff point after which the remaining prisoners would be automatically freed.

This week the truce delegations met again, after the eight-day recess, and the U.S. proposals were put forward in executive (secret) session. Then the negotiators took another recess until June 1.

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