Vyshinsky Appears To Be Conciliatory

Northern Advocate, 24 May 1949, Page 5

Vyshinsky Appears To Be Conciliatory

BT3“FOUR MINISTERS MEET ... •

PARIS, Mon. (11.30 a.m.). —The Big Four Foreign Ministers formally opened their conference on Germany this afternoon in the palatial Palais Rose, in Paris’ West End. Their first session ended after a secret two and a half hours* meeting. The next meeting will be tomorrow afternoon. Scores of uniformed and plain-clothes police were on duty at the Palais today, and M. Vyshinsky had a bodyguard of three burly Russians. ' ,' • ~ Mrs Bevin, who accompanied her husband to the Palais Rose, met M. Vyshinsky at the top of the marble staircase inside the building. * - He smiled, bowed from the waist and kissed her hand.

This is the fifth meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers since the war and it is the first major attempt to try to solve the German problem on a four-power basis since December, 1947.

The meeting began soon after the German Constituent Assembly in Bonn had officially proclaimed the Federal Republic of West Germany, for which a Government and Parliament will be elected within the next three months. The Western Foreign Ministers attended the opening meeting armed with a special report on the latest Berlin strike developments. The report had been prepared by the three Western Military Governments in Germany. CONSTITUTION PROCLAIMED

The West German constitution was formally proclaimed as law for 45,000,000 Germans today. The first to sign the document, which guarantees Germans freedoms they have not known since pre-Hitler days, was Dr Konrad Adenauer, president of the convention which drafted the constitution.

The signing of the constitution gives the Western Allies a foundation for the formation of a Government for all Germany should the Russians agree at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Paris to guarantee free elections in the Soviet zone. FOUR-POINT AGENDA

According to agency correspondents, the Council of Foreign Ministers agreed on the following four-point agenda for their current sessions:

(1) Problems of German unity, including economic and political principles and Allied (four-power) control.

(2) Berlin, including the currency question. « (3) Preparation of a peace treaty for Germany. ' \ ■ (4) Preparation of an Austrian independence treaty. M. Vyshinsky, whose mood appeared strikingly conciliatory, threw in a surprise suggestion. He said he thought the time was ripe for the Foreign Ministers’ Council (with China replacing France) to consider the preparation of a Japanese peace treaty.

Both Mr Acheson and Mr Bevin immediately opposed the suggestion. They asserted that the council was not the correct body to deal with the question. NO IMMEDIATE DECISION

The French Foreign Minister (M. Schuman), who was in the chair, said he did not think the suggestion made by M. Vyshinsky called for an immediate decision.

To this, the Russian Foreign Minister agreed. M. Schuman made a suggestion to add the Austrian treaty to the agenda, and was supported by Mr Acheson and Mr Bevin. M. Vyshinsky accepted.

The Ministers agreed that the sessions of their deputies should be entirely secret. They decided that certain restricted sessions which they themselves would have should be secret, and that only agreed communiques should be released for publication. 1 SEPARATE VERSIONS

Each delegation will present its version of what goes on at the plenary sessions. , In the course of the discussion of the agenda, M. Vyshinsky expressed a desire to include the question of fourpower control in Germany as a separate item.

He eventually agreed, however, that the subject should be wrapped up in the first item of the agenda, which concerned "problems of German unity, including economic and political principi es w JAPANESE QUESTION Replying to M. Vyshinsky’s suggestion for a Japanese peaee treaty, Mr Acheson said the Far Eastern Commission existed for inter-Allied discussion of the Japanese question, and it was not the business of the Council of Foreign Ministers to deal with Japan at all. He was, however, prepared to discuss M. Vyshinsky’s question at a later stage. Mr Bevin, agreeing with Mr Acheson, said the Commonwealth powers— Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Canada—were concerned with the question and all had a right to participate in its discussion. M. Vyshinsky said he did not propose that this question should be put on the agenda of the Paris meeting, but it was appropriate to see what problems might lie ahead for future meetings.

Replying to Mr Bevin’s reference to the Commonwealth claim to participate in the discussions, M. Vyshin-

sky said that naturally these countries \ should take a part in preparing the Japanese peace treaty, but not in the preliminary phase, which would con-' sist of a meeting of. the Council of, Foreign Ministers, with the participation of China.