Guest Rules

The aliens among the 770 correspondents covering the U.N. are guests of the U.S. as well as of U.N. Last week the two hosts were embroiled in a loud squabble over the rights & duties of their guests.

It began when U.S. immigration officers arrested two correspondents and lodged them on Ellis Island. From there, the pair wired U.N. Secretary General Trygve Lie for help. Lie relayed the appeals to Warren Austin, head of the U.S. delegation, adding an irritated note of his own.

Tiny Portion. The U.N., said Lie, had accredited Nicolas Kyriazidis as a correspondent representing Greek Communist papers, and Syed Sibtal Hasan for the Communist People's Age of Bombay. In failing to consult U.N. before arresting them for deportation, Lie felt, the U.S. had ignored its agreement with U.N.

In a tart reply, the State Department pointed out that the original fault lay with U.N. Hasan had entered the U.S. on a student's visa, and thus had no business getting a reporter's job without consulting the U.S. As for Kyriazidis, he was up for deportation because the two papers he had come to the U.S. to represent had been shut down by the Greek government. Nobody had notified the U.S. until after Kyriazidis' arrest, that he had found a new employer, a small Communist weekly in Cyprus. This looked like a dodge to the State Department, which doubted that the paper was paying "more than an infinitesimal portion" of his support.

Big Point. Nevertheless, both reporters were released. Deportation proceedings against Kyriazidis were suspended pending another look at his case. The charges against Hasan were dropped; he had booked passage to England, on his way to India, and expected to leave anyway.

Manhattan's Daily Worker fumed that "the whole policy of barring people from visiting here because they have a different view of the world and its problems is stupid." The Worker missed the point: technically, neither was being barred for his views, but for running afoul of U.S. immigration laws. The Herald Tribune thought the dispute a needless blunder: "Two or three telephone calls, made in time, would have cleared [it] up." But by the time it had reached the policy level of the State Department, whose lower levels should have caught it first, it was not that easy. The whole system of U.N. accreditation, the U.S. felt, needed "drastic revision."

Until then, the U.S. wanted U.N. to understand a couple of things: it was not questioning the rights of full-time working newsmen, but it had not "yielded up its sovereign rights to challenge the bona fides of any alien journalist*... to investigate, to hold hearings and to deport . . . if the circumstances warrant."

*In September, Pierre Courtade, correspondent for Paris' Communist daily, L'Humanite, got a U.S. visa only after promising to stay on the reservation (the U.N. and New York City areas) and to do no anti-American propagandizing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.