A Faux Pas at U.N.O.
No one can suppose that the action of Dr. Evatt and Mr. Trygve Lie, in approaching the political heads of the Western Great Powers and Russia regarding new conversations on Berlin, could serve any useful purpose. No one can well understand the action of Mr. Trygve Eie, who as Secretary-General of the United Nations is
as much the servant of the Security Council as of the General Assembly, in associating himself with a step which means a quite unwarrantable encroachment in a sphere which is at present entirely the Security Council's own. The Council has adopted a resolution, by a unanimous vote, apart from Russia and the Ukraine, calling on the four Powers concerned to remove immediately all traffic restrictions in the Berlin area, and at the same time to arrange a meeting of the four Military Governors to fix conditions for the introduction of the Soviet mark throughout the capital, and on the completion of these operations to reopen discussions in the Council of Foreign Ministers on German problems as a whole. The Western Powers accepted these proposals without reserve ; Russia vetoed the resolution proposing them. The lengthy letter now addressed, over the heads of the Foreign Ministers and the national delegations in Paris, to President Truman, Mr. Attlee, M. Queuille and Marshal Stalin, and apparently without consultation with, or the knowledge of, the Chairman of the Security Council, urges that the Western Powers should do what they have always firmly refused to do, conduct negotiations under duress while all the restrictions Russia has imposed are still in force. The whole procedure is shot through with impropriety and ineptitude, and tends inevitably not merely to discredit the authors of the new demarche, but to bring the United Nations itself into some disrepute.
