Whose Decision in Korea ?
The spectacle of Mr. Vyshinsky wiping out in a single t speech all the hopes that had been gathering round the Indian plan for settling the question of the Korean prisoners may well have caused, as Mr. Acheson said, a moment of despair among the delegates at the United Nations Assembly in New York. ' Even those who have always regarded Mr. Krishna Menon's efforts as certain to fail, or who have disliked the origi- nal dangerous assumption in his plan that the final decisions on the hard core of unrepatriated prisoners could be handed over to a political conference, must have felt something like disgust at the Russian delegate's exhibition of mere legalism on a question concerning the life and freedom of many thousands of men. But could there be any genuine satisfac- tion even in Peking that proposals which the Chinese Government had at least not rejected outright, and which could well have opened the road to a satisfactory settlement of the whole Korean war, were so brusquely swept aside by Mr. Vyshinsky, who claimed that he was speaking for the Chinese Government as well as his own ? For more than a month now the Communist forces in Korea have been engaged in a new strategy which involves the loss of many thousands of men in the effort to take or hold very small areas of ground. It is true that these methods put the United Nations command in a rather awkward situation, since this is precisely the type of strategy that that command is most loath to imitate. But the Communist casualties are enormous. If they go on at the present rate for a few more weeks they will exceed the total of prisoners whose unwillingness to go back to China or North Korea is now holding up the whole armistice settlement. It is difficult to believe that, in these circumstances, the Chinese willingness to throw overboard every chance of agreement is quite as strong as that of the Russians, who are still not very deeply engaged in the actual fighting in Korea. And this fact alone makes it worth while for the United Nations to continue to try to work out a settlement plan.
