Split Ranks

The U.N. witnessed an unfamiliar sight last week--a visible split in the Anglo-American Alliance. The friends parted company--at least for the moment--in the misty thickets of the General Assembly, where the world's diplomats are searching for a solution to the Korean truce deadlock, and debating whether some 40,000 unwilling North Korean and Chinese prisoners should be forcibly returned to their Communist masters.

Into the bramble stepped an intense, bushy-haired diplomat named V. K. Krishna Menon, who represents India, long one of the least enthusiastic U.N. supporters in Korea. A brilliant, English-schooled (London University, London School of Economics), left-wing intellectual, Menon had personal orders from his staunch friend, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to introduce a compromise formula on the P.W. issue. It was the kind of tricky assignment Krishna Menon savored with relish.

Heavy Diet for the Mind. A calmed-down rebel who went to England in 1924 to fight for India's freedom and stayed long enough to become free India's first high commissioner in London, Menon is a political ascetic who requires a heavy diet for the mind, almost nothing for the body (his typical daily fare: tea. tomato juice, a few bits of fruit or vegetable). While agitating for India in London, he also plunged into English politics, once ran as a Labor candidate for the House of Commons. After India won her independence in 1947, Nehru asked Krishna to design the tie that was to bind India, as a republic, to the Commonwealth. The result was the ingeniously vague document under which India accepts the British crown "as the symbol of the free association of [the Commonwealth's] members."

The same talent for calculated vagueness produced Menon's compromise plan in the U.N. A long, complex document, it seemed to agree that no prisoners should be returned against their will, but it threw out all the safeguards U.N. negotiators at Panmunjom have been carefully inserting for months. It proposed that the U.N. and Communist armies hand over their P.W.s to a commission made up of Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia, neutral Sweden and Switzerland* and a fifth member to serve as "umpire." The commission would try to get the prisoners exchanged, though none forcibly. If they did not succeed in 90 days, the whole business would be turned over to the full-dress peace conference which is supposed to follow a Korean truce.

Still Warm Friends. This proposal left all kinds of holes for the Communists to wiggle out of. But so pleased was Britain's Anthony Eden to see an Asian nation like India accept the Western stand against forcible repatriation that he did not think the U.N. should insist on a formula "exactly complete in every particular."

Just such completeness in every particular is what the U.S. has learned, on the painful road from Yalta to Panmunjom, must be exacted from the Communists at every turn. The U.S. insisted on detailed amendments to the Indian proposal, and asked Britain to back them. Eden refused. Secretary of State Dean Acheson then took a strong and unprecedented step. A State Department spokesman announced that, because of the importance of the principle involved, the two allies are split on the issue--although--"we are still warm friends."

The rift was the kind of thing the Russians like to seize upon, hoping to be able to crumble the bonds between the U.S. and its allies. But this time, the Russians did not know how to exploit it. In the Assembly this week, Russia's Andrei Vishinsky angrily rejected the compromise plan, and just as vituperatively departed from Moscow's usual dovelike cooings at India. The Indian proposal, said Vishinsky, was "designed not to put an end to the war but to perpetuate it."

* The same four countries which the Korean truce negotiators have agreed should make up a watchdog team to supervise an armistice.

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