A STATESMAN'S SPEECH
Sir,-If I may be allowed to quote very briefly from the Report on the Repatriation of Korean P.O.W.s by the Neutral Nations Commission, it may help G.H.D. to refrain from such obvious disposition to accept as. true what he‘ would like to be so: The P.O.W. Organisation in the Southern Camps and the leadership which sustained them negate all assumptions or assertions about freedom of choice. As was already stated in the Commission’s interim report (para. 11), "any prisoner who desired repatriation had to do so clandestinely and in tear of his life," or under protection offered by the guards of the Custodial Force, India. The Commission must frankly state its conviction, founded on its experience, that in the absence of fuller and further implementation of the Terms of Reference, it would be a bare assertiom unsupported by any evidence that the prisoners had voluntarily sought non-repatriation. The "representatives" of the prisoners (from the southern camps), anxious as they were to prevent any prisoner from breaking away to seek repatriation, so devised the emergence of the prisoners from their compounds as to make it extremely difficult for anyone except the most fearless and desperate prisoner to approach the Indian guards and seek repatriation. Fear of the leaders and influence of the organisation, therefore, eer to the very end. (Page 120, para. If a perusal of the full report is insufficient to disillusion G.H.D., I would recommend his reading of Wilfred Burchett’s book, This Monstrous War, and, if he is possessed of a really stout stomach, Winnington and Burchett’s Koje Unscreened. The report referred to above is contained amongst other United Nations authorised literature in Reports of Assembly Official Records, 8th Session, Supplement 18. It is available at the Auckland Public Library and presumably at libraries in other centres.
H. A.
PERMIN
(Auckland).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 5
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305A STATESMAN'S SPEECH New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 5
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