INDONESIAN DISPUTE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26958, 18 December 1948, Page 7

INDONESIAN DISPUTE

CONDITIONS FOR NEGOTIATION DUTCH REMAIN FIRM IN DEMANDS NZPA—Reuter—Copyright THE HAGUE, Dec. 16. The Netherlands Government announced that it would resume negotiations with the Indonesian Republican Government only if the Republ’c “ ended its truce violations ” and undertook to become one of the Sta.es of the Dutch-sponsored Federal Indonesia. The Dutch rejected a letter from the Republican Pi-emier, Mohammed Hatta, proposing further negotiations after the talks in Java had broken down. , Reuter’s Batavia correspondent says that, though the possibilities of further hostilities between the Dutch and the Republicans have been widely discussed in Batavia since the Dutch announced their intention to set up an interim Government without the Republic, the Republican Government does not appear to have lost hope of an eventual peaceful solution. Besides . instructing its representative in Paris to ask the Security Council to discuss the Good Offices Committee’s report, the Republican Government has issued a statement that it is “ qpnfident that the only peaceful means remaining for arriving at a definite solution and avoiding the emergence of a great disaster in Indonesia is arbitration, which has actually been proposed by the Republican Government since the beginning, and is contained in the Security Council’s resolution of August 1, 1947.”