RHODESIA DEBATE

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29858, 26 June 1962, Page 14

RHODESIA DEBATE

N.Z. Urges Reason (N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) NEW YORK, June 23. New Zealand, France, and Italy yesterday urged the United Nations General Assembly to use reason and not emotion in seeking a change in Southern Rhodesia. Mr F. H. Corner (New Zealand) said the United Nations was fortunate that Britain, with its “outstanding record of liberal thought and action,’’ was one of those most closely concerned with Southern Rhodesia. He attacked the Soviet bloc, by inference, for “dogmatic irresponsibility’’ in demanding independence within six months.

The pace of progress ■ must be determined by the rate of establishing a non-racial society and with equality of legal and political rights, not by a mere transfer of sovereignty, he said. It was not a “legal quibble” but a fact that the British Government was constitutionally unable to intervene in Southern Rhodesia, thanks to constitutional conventions in the Commonwealth which had the force of law. Southern Rhodesia now possessed its own Government, Parliament, and armed forces and the plain fact was they could not be set aside except by military intervention.

‘■The meyi in authority in Southern. Rhodesia,” Mr Corner said, ‘‘are not inflexible, not rabid racists, not slaves to some blindly held theories. but pragmatic human beings. They are not intractable people. We are not at a dead end,” he said. Many members of the Commonwealth looked upon Southern Rhodesia as a test case of the concept of multiracial association. perhaps the Commonwealth’s greatest contribution. It would be tragic if the Assembly hindered rather than helped the peaceful development of this association.