GERM WARFARE CHARGE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27010, 9 April 1953, Page 9

GERM WARFARE CHARGE

Soviet Urges U.S. To Sign Convention NEW YORK, April 7. The United Nations Political Committee adjourned until tomorrow the debate, resumed today, on the Communist charges of the use by the United Nations forces of germ warfare in Korea. The Soviet Union had ignored appeals that the charges should be dropped. The Soviet delegate (Mr Valerian Zorin) after rejecting a call by the Greek and Peruvian delegates to drop the charges, asked the United States to drop its demand for an impartial investigation of the charges. He said there was no need now for the committee to consider the details of the charges. He urged instead that the United States should ratify the Geneva Convention against germ warfare, and suggested that such action would close the incident so far as the Soviet Union was concerned. Mr Zorin, who used unusually subdued tones, said the Soviet Government was “fully alive to the circumstances” in which the debate was taking place (this was considered by United Nations observers to be a reference to the truce negotiations at Panmunjon). He expressed “surprise tinged with regret” that the United States had reacted so vigorously against the charges. Mr Zorin called for the committee’s discussion of the subject to end, but said that a negative answer ot an evasive one from the United States would not satisfy the Soviet Union. “If the United States presses its proposal the Soviet Union cannot agree to such an impartial investigation since the United States has opposed the presence here of the Communist Chinese and North Korean authorities to present their side of the case.” He said that agreement by the United States to ratify the Geneva agreement would constitute the best proof of its intention to ban germ warfare and its intention not to use it in future. The Soviet Union is one of 42 countries which have ratified the agreement. The United States has said that it will not ratify the convention because it is not enforceable. All countries with troops in Korea are cosponsoring the United States resolution calling for an impartial investigation.