22 December 1967
SAV 66. Confidential
Nauru and New Guinea
Our telegram 2375, dated 19th December,1 reported briefly on the adoption in plenary of the resolutions from the Fourth Committee on Nauru and New Guinea … 2
2. This telegram gives our assessment of the Assembly’s discussion of the report of the Trusteeship Council, which covered Nauru, New Guinea and the future composition of the council.
[ matter omitted ]3
5. The outcome of our decision to seek a special session of the Trusteeship Council justified our recommendation … We obtained … after a certain amount of pushing from ourselves and the other administering powers, a formal legal opinion from the Secretary-General that after the departure of New Zealand Liberia would stay on the Council until the end of its term at the end of 1968, after which, unless an amendment were made to the Charter, the Council would be composed of the two remaining administering authorities and the other four permanent members of the Security Council.
6. Had we failed to obtain such a legal opinion from the Secretary-General and have it noted by the Council we would have run the risk of an attempt in the Fourth Committee to ignore the legal position and have the Council’s present function transferred to the Committee of Twenty–four.
7. In the Trusteeship Council the representative of the Soviet Union made his customary unpleasant remarks about the unrepresentative nature of the Council, but intimated that he accepted the Secretary-General’s opinion. The Soviet statement was made in such a way however as to leave it open to the USSR not to oppose an illegal move which might develop in the Assembly to wind up the Council.
[ matter omitted ]
12. New Guinea
… We faced a difficult tactical situation on New Guinea. The resolution adopted last year (2227)4 was thoroughly unacceptable to us. It deplored Australia’s failure to implement an earlier resolution, called on us to remove discriminatory electoral qualifications, to abolish discriminatory practices in a variety of fields, to hold elections on the basis of universal adult suffrage, to fix an early date for independence and to refrain from using the Territory for military purposes incompatible with the Charter. We therefore expected that this year we would be faced with a resolution which would go further and either deplore our failure or even condemn us for not having implemented last year’s resolution. Once the great majority of countries in the United Nations have voted in a particular way they find it very difficult to change their position even though they may subsequently realise that they voted thoughtlessly in the first place. We knew there would be very few countries indeed prepared to say that the string of condemnations expressed in Resolution 2227 had not been correct and should be rescinded. We therefore felt we were in something of a tactical straight jacket. We decided the best thing to do was to give a full exposition of conditions in the Territory particularly developments following the information sent a few weeks previously by the Department of Territories, and then criticise last year’s resolution and show once more where it was wrong. We said we had been unable to comply with it because its allegations about conditions in the Territory were simply not true.
13. Liberia, in the person of Eastman, who had been the author of last year’s resolution, launched a highly emotional attack on us, accusing us of racism and indulging in excessive unpleasantness. Eastman had had a prepared text which he discarded after hearing our opening statement and spoke ex tempore. He introduced a draft resolution which simply reaffirmed last year’s and earlier resolutions and called on the administering authority to take the necessary measures to implement them without delay.
14. In a way, the very intemperance of Eastman’s attack did us some good. He showed such personal bias that the more respectable Africans and most of the Asians were embarrassed by it. He was followed by Shakhov,5 the Soviet representative, who made a long statement repeating accusations about Australians taking all the best land in New Guinea, gross discrimination in all fields, pitiful labour conditions and the whole Territory being turned into an armed camp. Then the representative of Ghana made a fair and considered statement in which he acknowledged a great deal of effort was being put into the Territory.
15. These four statements were made at the first of the two meetings at which New Guinea was discussed. On the next three days the item remained on the agenda of the Committee but nobody spoke. On the fourth day after the Chairman had said he wanted a vote of the Liberian draft resolution we made a fairly long statement in right of reply to Liberia and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union replied to this but it was not an effective intervention. Liberia said nothing, Eastman was not in the chair. In the interim I had spoken to the Acting Chairman of the Liberian delegation and said how disturbed we were by the nature of Eastman’s attack. There were no other speakers in the general debate.
16. The United Kingdom and the United States spoke briefly on the draft resolution defending our administration and saying they would vote against the draft. Argentina, Chile, Ceylon and Mexico said they would vote in favour although last year they had had serious reservations over paragraph five of Resolution 2227, the one which had been particularly condemnatory about us. Brazil and Netherlands spoke after the vote. The Netherlands was particularly useful because at our request it changed its vote from last year’s abstention to a negative, and brought Belgium along to do the same.
17. Between the time the Liberian draft resolution was introduced and the time it was voted on in plenary we did a lot of work to try to influence votes. I sent personal notes to eighty of my colleagues from all groups[,] except the Communist Bloc and the extreme African and Arabs[,] covering copies of our opening statement. I said that the matter was an important one to the Australian Government and that the Liberian draft was objectionable. Between the Committee and plenary votes I and other members of the delegation spoke also to a large number of delegates. As a result all the representatives of all Scandinavian countries referred back to governments for instructions, and all finally changed from an abstention to a negative vote. The delegations of Singapore and Laos which had not been present in the Committee vote abstained, which was the most we could expect, and the Chinese changed from an abstention to a negative vote. We tried hard to change the other Western Europeans to a negative vote and Latin Americans such as Mexico at least to abstain but they did not move from last year’s positions.
18. On the whole we feel some satisfaction with the outcome. The debate was shorter this year. Last year Tanzania, Guinea, Mali and UAR6 and others joined in severe condemnatory statements. This year there were only three general debate statements, two of which we disposed of in right of reply, while the other from Ghana was not offensive and, on the contrary, helpful in some ways. So the general exposition of our case was not nearly as seriously challenged as it had been last year and the number of really damaging and disparaging things said was much smaller. Also we formed the impression that some more reasonable representatives felt some embarrassment at the strength of last year’s criticisms, especially in view of Eastman’s performance.
19. The resolution adopted, although it reaffirms what last year’s resolution said and calls on us to take the necessary measures to implement without delay provisions of earlier resolutions, does not use any insulting language or itemise the charges against us. Indeed in the course of our lobbying we had to hand out copies of last year’s resolution in order to show some poorly briefed delegations just what it was they were reaffirming.
20. The increase in the number of negative votes was a good development. The vote showed that all the Western group and a number of South East Asians repudiated or disassociated themselves from unjust criticisms of Australia. This year’s resolution can less properly be regarded as an expression of opinion by the Assembly when so many influential delegations opposed it or abstained.
21. The improvement came about partly through luck in that for the last ten days it was meeting, the Committee was more concerned with Gibraltar than with any other subject. The Spaniards had mounted a tough and in the event successful campaign on Gibraltar and this took most of the people’s attention. We were fortunate that Malecela,7 the Chairman of the Committee of Twenty-four, was absent for most of the New Guinea debate. Moreover, the fact of Nauruan independence, of Hammer de Roburt’s commendable words worked to our advantage.8
22. The bitterness and resentment so evident in Eastman’s speech worked to some extent to his disadvantage. I think the Asians know us well enough to know that he had passed beyond the realm of credibility. It was clear that he had some personal resentment against Australia which motivated him. It is significant that although we replied at length to Eastman and treated him hard in our right of reply, not one other African came in either to say a word in his defence or in criticism of us. Finally there was some realisation among the more reasonable delegations that the Assembly had gone too far last year. To sum up it is not too much to say that there has been a slight but evident recession from the critical position which the Fourth Committee and the Assembly took against us last year.
23. Finally on the question of the future of the Trusteeship Council we have come out well. We have on record a legal opinion from the Secretariat noted by the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly which is what we wanted and in fact goes further than our own Departmental legal opinion went. This opinion was challenged by nobody in the Trusteeship Council or the Fourth Committee. We would expect at the next session of the Assembly there will be some political attack on the Council but we are in a much better position to resist it now that the legal position has been stated clearly.
[NAA: A 1838, 936/3 part 2]
1 Not printed.
2 Resolution 2348 of 19 December 1967—adopted by the Assembly by 85 to 16 with 18 abstentions—reaffirmed both the ‘inalienable right of the people of Papua and New Guinea to self-determination and independence in accordance with resolution 1514’ (see footnote 7, Document 14) and the previous position of the General Assembly as outlined in 1965 and 1966 (See editorial note entitled ‘The United Nations Resolution on PNG, 1966’). It called upon Australia to ‘take necessary measures to implement without delay the provisions of the above resolutions’ (Yearbook of the United Nations /967, New York, 1969, pp. 612–3).
3 Matter omitted refers to the Australian Government’s decision to grant independence to Nauru and the subsequent decision by the Australian delegation in New York to seek a special session of the Trusteeship Council. The Australian delegation had been given discretion with regard to this last matter, on the proviso that it bear in mind the Government’s objective of the ‘maintenance of the Trusteeship Council’s functions, rights and responsibilities, vis-a-vis the Committee of Twenty-four’.
4 See editorial note ‘The United Nations resolution on PNG, 1966’.
5 Pavel Shakov, Envoy and Minister, Permanent Mission of the Soviet Union to the United Nations.
6 United Arab Republic.
7 John Malecela, Tanzanian Ambassador to the UN.
8 De Roburt, Head Chief ofNauru, had made clear to the Trusteeship Council that rehabilitation of Nauru ‘was no longer a concern of the United Nations but a matter between the Nauruan and partner governments’.