‘U.S. Regret Rebuke To South Africa9

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29162, 24 March 1960, Page 13

‘U.S. Regret Rebuke To South Africa 9

NEW YORK, March 23. Diplomats interpreted the State Department’s expression of regret over the loss of life in the South African rioting as a rebuke to South Africa, according to the “New York Times” today.

The newspaper added in a Washington dispatch that the diplomats saw in it also a deliberate gesture by the United States to gain the goodwill of the rising number of independent African Governments and to head off the Soviet bloc’s exploitation of African grievances. The State Department said that the United States regretted “the tragic loss of life” resulting from measures taken against Africans demonstrating in South Africa. The department issued a statement in which it said the United States deplored violence in all its forms. It expressed the hope that the African people of the Union “will be able to obtain redress for legitimate grievances by peaceful means.” In issuing the statement, the department said that as a matter of practice it did not ordinarily comment on the internal affairs of governments with which it enjoyed normal relations, but it could not help but express regret in the present case. Mr Lincoln White, the department spokesman, read the state-

ment at a press conference. He refused under questioning to interpret it in any way. The “New York Times" said the State Department’s comment on South African violence was made in response to a question by an Indian reporter. It said the statement had been prepared in advance, apparently in anticipation of such a question. The newspaper also reported that State* Department officials discussed “inconclusively” the possibility that the South African Government might react by raising objections to United States plans to fire an intercontinental missile from Florida past the tip of South Africa, into the Indian Ocean. The South Africans had been informed of the plans and had so far acquiesced. The newspaper added that United States experts foresaw a period of increasing violence in South Africa. The “New York Times” made Mr Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, organiser of the anti-pass campaign in South Africa, its “Man in the News” for today, describing him as “a brilliant scholar and linguist, a polemical writer, an intensely serious, courageous, dedicated young man.” The “Washington Post” said In a leading article today: “If anybody ought to learn from the demonstrations against the pass laws, it is the Government of Prime Minister Verwoerd. An entire people cannot be kept in permanent subjugation and denied all outlets for peaceful redress without inviting exactly the kind of calamitous incident that has now occurred.” In Toronto, the Canadian Press reported that the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples last night urged the Federal Government to issue a statement condemning the "brutal attacks upon the blacks of South Africa during the last few days.” The “New York Herald Tribune’s” correspondent at the United Nations, noting today’s scheduled meeting of the ninenation African bloc on the South African question, said it was “conceivable” that they might seek to convene a special session of the General Assembly to bring pressure against the South African Government. However, no other newsagency or newspaper available in New York reported this possibility early today.