Colonies-The Acid Test

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 307, 11 May 1945, Page 12

Colonies-The Acid Test

{ BELIEVE that two great moral principles must from the very outset be an integral part of the constitution of even @ provisional international organisation,

The first is the recognition by all nations of the inalienable right of every people on earth to enjoy freedom of religion, of information, and of speech. There can be no peaceful or free world of the future unless every nation recognises these freedoms as human rights. Every government, before it joins the world organisation, should be required to show that its citizens are enabled to enjoy these rights. through effective guarantees contained in their national constitution. The second principle is equal in importance. Hundreds of millions of people at the outset of the present war were under alien sovereignty. as colonial subjects of the imperial powers. Can we conceivably envisage a peaceful or stable world if it is to continue, when the war is won, half slave and half free? The: peoples of Asia, of the Near East, and of Africa are waiting to see what the victory of the United Nations is going to mean to them. They will regard the decisions taken by us as an acid test. Unless the forces of nationalism, which are fast growing more and more powerful in all these vast areas of the earth, are canalised into constructive channels, a devastating state of chaos will ensue. The determination of some of these peoples to secure their freedom cannot longer be thwarted. The international organisation must consecrate in a practical form the basic principle that no nation has an inherent or unlimited right to govern subject peoples. The colonial powers must recognise that their control is to be exercised first of all to prepare these peoples for self-government as soon as they are capable of exercising

this right; and that until they are fitted for autonomy the colonial power will be regarded by. the international organisation solely as an administering power-as a trustee-and as such must be responsible to world public opinion through the international organisation itself. Peoples capable of self-government must be given this right by the international organisation whatever their race or colour, or whatever the vested interests of any present colonial power may be. The United Nations must not evade this problem as the Allied Powers evaded it in 1919 by creating on paper a mandate system and then washing their hands of all further responsibility. No power on earth should again be permitted to ignore the obligation to demonstrate that its control of subject peoples is being exercised to expedite their fitness for autonomy, and that, until such time, its administration of their affairs is primarily in their interest.