United States Charges Russia With Having Many Millions Of People In Slave Labour Camps

Wanganui Chronicle, 16 February 1949, Page 5

United States Charges Russia With Having Many Millions Of People In Slave Labour Camps

Wants U.N.O. To Make Impartial Report NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (Ree. 10 pm).—The United States today charged the Soviet Union with having between 8,000.000 and 14,000,000 people in slave labour camps, and asked the Economic and Social Council to make an impartial investigation.

Mr. Willard Thorp (United States) told the Council that there was much evidence, including some from Soviet sources, to support the charge. Mr. Thorp said that at a meeting of one of the council’s committees on October 18, 1948, the Soviet delegate (Mr. Pavlov) admitted the existence of “corrective labour camps" in the Soviet, but gave no statistics on the number of prisoners concerned. Mr. Thorp asked: (1) What types of crimes did the inmates of these camps commit? (2) How were they being corrected? (3) How were they convicted? (4) Are they allowed to communicate with people outside? (5) Are all the members of prisoners families, also being ‘corrected?’ (6) What is the death-rate in the camps?

“To none of these questions did the Soviet Union ever volunteer an answer,” said Mr. Thorp. He added that there also were disturbing reports about work in places where ordinary recruitment failed because conditions were so severe. This applied to districts like Novaya, Zemlaya, Northern Siberia, Delstroi, in the Soviet Far East, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Saghalin. Mr. Thorp said there also were reports that similar conditions existed in uranium mines on the Czecho-slovak-German border, and that the pattern was the same wherever Communists established their regime. The only way to satisfy the United Nations that these charges against some of their members were false was to ask the Soviet to open its doors to an impartial study of conditions. The council adjourned until tomorrow.