Memorandum of Conversation with Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Ambassador of the Netherlands S. Herman van Roijen, Foreign Minister of the Netherlands Dirk Stikker, John Foster Dulles, and Livingston Satterthwaite

S - Mr. Battle 870 CONF IDENTIAL mey 269 DECLASSIFIED U. S. DELEGATION E Ö. 11652, Sec. 3(E) and 5(D) or (E) Dept. of State letter, A 5.12.20 JAPANESE PEACE CONFERENCE to ARCHIVES 'NATIONAL RECORDS SERVICE** AND Bx NLT HC NARS Date 6.30.76 MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION September 3, 1951 PARTICIPANTS: Netherlands Foreign Minister, Mr. Stikker Ambassador van Roi jen Secretary of State Dean Acheson Mr. Dulles Mr. Satterthwaite COPIES TO: S - Mr. Battle S - Mr. Dulles EUR FE The Hague The Secretary and Mr. Dulles asked Mr. Stikker and Ambassador Roijen to lunch to explore with them ways of overcoming Dutch difficulties which had arisen in connection with certain aspects with the reparations aspects of the Japanese Peace Treaty (Article 14b). After a general discussion, the Secretary remarked that we understood some domestic problems had arisen in Holland on ropa- rations questions and we would like to talk about them. Stikker said that his government recently - he emphasized that it was a recent development - had been under strong criticism from the large and powerful organization of Dutch civilians who had been interned in the East Indies by the Japanese. Stikker said that, unlike the case in many other countries, the Dutch civilian internees reatly outnumbered the prisoners of war, the ratio being about 100,000 civilians to some 30,000 prisoners of war. While the prisoners of war who had been interned have been taken care of, most of the civilians, except those who had been helped by some of the large companies they were working for, had lost everything and had not received any rolief. Stikker said that this organized group of civilians, including families of voting age, numbered about 70,000 and that they had been criticizing the government, first for its, what they term, "soft" policy towards Indonesia and second, because the Japanese Peace Treaty draft appeared to commit the Dutch government to the abandonment of all possibility of private individual claims against the Japanese Government. In addition the troaty specifically pro- vided that Japanese funds in neutral countries, if recovered, would be distributed by the Red Cross only to prisoners of war and not to civilians. Stikker pointed out that the main diffi- culty arose from the fact that the original draft did not