Britain Accuses Soviet— VAST SLAVE SYSTEM IN RUSSIA IS WITHOUT PARALLEL

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 October 1948, Page 5

Britain Accuses Soviet— VAST SLAVE SYSTEM IN RUSSIA IS WITHOUT PARALLEL

(Recd. 10 a.m.) . ’ PARIS, October 15. The British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr C. P. Mayhew, speaking before the United Nations Social Committee, charged Russia with maintaining a vast slave system, recruited from its own citizens, which was without parallel in history.

He was answering a Soviet accusation that British subjects suffered from exhaustion and death in the colonies.

He said: “Hunger and exhaustion are imposed on the armies of forced workers in the Soviet Union as a result of deliberate State policy. Many millions of Russian workers live in wretchedness and undernourishment under the cloak of having committed crimes against the regime. If the evidence is substantiated, the Soviet claim to have set up a paradise on earth is based on a fraud.”

Mr Mayhew said it appeared that between 5,000,000 and 15,000,000 forced workers were collected in camps all over Russia. “If we pitch it as low as 5,000,000 that means that 21 per cent, of the Soviet Union are slaves, compared with 0.13 per cent, in the Czarist days. There is terrible and ever-growing evidence of the monstrous system of oppression.”

The United Nations Trusteeship Committee rejected Russian resolutions asking the Colonial Powers to supply political information about their dependent territories and for the United Nations to send examining missions to non-self-governing territories yearly.