LITTLE LIKELIHOOD OF EARLY END TO FOREIGN MINISTERS’ CONFERENCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27094, 31 May 1949, Page 5

LITTLE LIKELIHOOD OF EARLY END TO FOREIGN MINISTERS’ CONFERENCE

New Zealand Press Association—Copyright Rec. 9 p.m. LONDON, May 30. The Western Powers used the week-end pause in the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Paris to inform Western German political leaders on the state of the negotiations and to sound their opinion, reports Reuter’s Frankfurt correspondent. Reuter’s Paris correspondent says there seems no likelihood of an early end to the Foreign Ministers’ talks unless the Berlin railway blockade should cause an adjournment on the ground that the New York agreement to lift the blockade has been broken.

British- national newspapers were skeptical of Russian co-operation along the lines suggested by the Western Powers. The diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Herald says the Western Ministers will reject/the Soviet's plan for Germany’s unification and Ru c sia will reject the Western plan. The diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail says the hope of achieving an agreement on a plan for organising a united Germany under four-Power supervision has been virtually abandoned.

The Daily Telegraph, in an editorial, says the presentation of East and West plans at the Foreign Ministers’ conference meant that “ we have come out in the open and abandoned, let us hope for ever, the pretence so assiduously and ruinously sustained that the Russian conception of democracy and our own can be conformed.”

The News Chronicle says the terms the West has offered Mr Andrei Vyshinsky (the Soviet Foreign Minister) are the maximum bid for his friendship. The Communist newspaper Daily Worker says the Western Foreign Ministers’ proposals for Germany represent the United States claim to be the unquestioned master of a united Germany. “While the Western Powers are playing their highest card in Paris, putting before Mr Vyshinsky their terms for restoring the full unity of Germany, the news from Berlin and elsewhere demonstrates how great are the obstacles in the way of unity,” says The Times. “Even if Mr Vyshinsky offers to discuss the plans, he must be expected to bring forward amendments designed to ensure the German Socialist Party’s continued hold over the eastern zone, and the basis for any four-Power understanding - on . full unity would then collapse. “ Failing agreement on complete unity, the four Foreign Ministers will presumably strive to arrange a loose economic agreement between the eastern and western parts of Germany. Any easy hopes that the lifting of the Berlin blockade would allow persons and goods to pass freely across the zonal boundary between east and west have vanished. The course of the struggle depends on Soviet willingness to come to a larger agreement to enable trade to develop between the two parts of Germany—an agreement into which a unified Berlin could fit “In spite of recent obstructions there are some few encouraging signsin the background. The poor eco nomic conditions of the Eastern zone have at times been exaggerated, but there is no doubt that it needs manufactured goods, which only Western Germany can at present supply. Mr Vyshinsky’s insistence on using the two economic organisations as a link between the ! two halves of Germany and the evident Soviet intention to control the kind of goods entering their zone seem to show that the Soviet Government has in mind a limited economic agreement.”