Synopsis I, Korea - The Final United Nations Debates, October-December, 1952

KOREA - Synopsis I: The Final UN Debates, (Page 1) S. October - December, 1952 RECORDAND U.S. SERVICET [ The following account and evaluation of the final UN debates in 1952 on Korea is taken from The United States in World Affairs, 1952, by Richard P. Stebbins, pp. 334-348.) Knowing the obstacles to effective action by the Assembly in matters of this kind [ending the war in Korea], and recognizing the unwillingness of most UN members to provide any additional support for the military effort in Korea, the US delegation had gathered in New York [for the opening of the Assembly on October 14) with very modest expectations. Even if there had been a chance that Peking and Moscow would heed the Assembly more readily than they had heeded the UN armistice delegation, it seemed unlikely that the Assembly would be any more successful in finding a way around the fundamental disagreement as to the exchange of unwilling prisoners of war. If anything, there was a danger that too much helpfulness on the part of the Assembly would make the situation more difficult by casting doubt on the merits of this country's position in regard to prisoner repatriation. The US was satis- fied that there was no alternative to its insistence that no North Korean or Chinese prisoner should be repatriated against his will. Every reasonable method of giving effect to this principle, Washington felt, had been fully developed at Panmunjom, only to meet with uncompromising rejection by the Communist negotiators. The most the Assembly could realistically be expected to do, in the American view, was to endorse this country's conduct of the armistice negotiations and give its moral support to the position taken by the UN negotiators on instructions from Washington. To this end the US went out of its way to furnish the Assembly with full details of its conduct of the armistice negotiations. A special report from the Unified Command reviewed the entire record since the date of the first Soviet "peace" move on June 23, 1951 [Synopsis H] Secretary Acheson, in a personal appearance before the Assembly's Political and Security Committee on October 24, analyzed the situation in great detail and reminded the fifty-nine other delegations that, great as was the general yearning for peace, "ww must not and we cannot buy peace at the price of honor. No act of the Assembly, Mr. Acheson insisted, must tweaken or destroy the noble purpose" of the sacrifices made by men of the UN in Korea. Thus the draft resolution on Korea which he introduced on behalf of the US and twenty other governments merely "noted with approval" the conduct of the armistice negotia- tions to date and called upon Communist China and North Korea to avert further blood- shed by accepting the principle of nonforcible repatriation of prisoners. This proposal was obviously closer to the Assembly's views than the alterna- tive plans submitted on behalf of the Soviet bloc, which purported to be based on "new" proposals advanced by the Communists at Panmunjom but seemed nevertheless to insist on the total repatriation of prisoners under all circumstances. Never- theless the Assembly as a whole was not in a mood to accept the American recommen- dations without careful scrutiny. Too much uncertainty prevailed on several material points. A good many delegates were asking themselves whether the next administration in the US would adhere as steadfastly to the principle of nonforcible repatriation as the Truman administration had done. Even among the sponsors of the twenty-one-power draft resolution, there were some who thought they glimpsed a possibility of compromise in Vyshinsky's calculated vagueness on some aspects of