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paragraph by paragraph both in the First Committee and in the Assembly receiving in its favour only the votes of the five members of the Soviet group and of Yugoslavia; and the joint four-power draft resolution was accepted without change in the First Committee by 38 (N.Z.)f to 6 and, later, in the plenary session by 50 (N.Z.) to 6 (the Soviet group and Yugoslavia), with 2 abstentions (India and Israel). The debate followed closely the debates at the second and third sessions of the General Once again the Soviet group (now minus Yugoslavia) insisted that the true cause of the Balkan dispute and of the failure of conciliation was the aggressive character of the " vicious Monarcho-Fascist Greek Government," whose policies were supported by the United States and the United Kingdom " as part of the plan of the Anglo-American expansionists for aggression against the People's Democracies." Once again the majority of representatives defended the integrity of UNSCOB, took the Committee point by point over its conclusions and evidence, recalled that the Greek elections in 1946 v/ ere internationally supervised, and pointed out the relation between Soviet expansionism in the Balkans and in other parts of the world. The representative of the United Kingdom (Mr McNeil) was the chief critic of the Soviet proposals. In his opinion it was a matter for the Greek Government to decide whether it should grant an amnesty; already it had granted relaxation of sentences. As to the proposal for the holding of free elections, Mr McNeil- expressed his confidence that in due course the Greek Government would announce its intention to do so ; he emphasized the problems created by civil disturbance, the movement of three-quarters of a million refugees, &c. He saw in the demand for participation of " Greek democratic circles at the head of the national freedom movement in Greece " an attempt of a .group, now that its effort to overthrow the legitimate Greek Government had failed, to assume " legal " opposition to that Government. Similarly, outside supervision of elections could take place only at the invitation of the Greek Government; and he recalled that the Soviet Union when invited to participate in supervising the last Greek elections had refused in order to avoid creating a precedent for Allied scrutiny of the Bulgarian and Roumanian elections. The Soviet Union's proposal for a Joint Commission, including the U.S.S.R., to control the frontiers could have little meaning, since reserved places on UNSCOB awaited occupation by the Soviet Union and Poland. As to the cessation of outside aid, the Committee was not concerned with aid given at the request of the Greek Government, but with illegal aid, given in violation of the Charter and the resolution of the General Assembly, to a faction conspiring to overthrow the legal Greek Government.
f Here and subsequently the insertion of the letters "N.Z." after a voting figure denotes that that figure includes a New Zealand vote. t For full summary of these, see Publications No. 60 and No. 75 of the Department of External Affairs.
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