212. Telegram From the Mission to the United Nations to the Department of State0

831. For Secretary from Stevenson.

1.
Because of generally negative posture we will be in during GA on Africa, I suspect you might want make special effort in your talks with key African FonMins here to impress on them that while we may have opposed some specific proposals in GA, US objectives in Africa remain unchanged and that we remain as committed as ever to liquidation of colonialism and racism and to early emergence of prosperous and independent African states. Our record re economic and political assistance to independent African states needs no documentation, but Africans know practically nothing about our private efforts to get Portuguese and South Africans and even UK when necessary to be more forthcoming. Perhaps you could usefully describe for some of them our arms control policies vis-à-vis South Africa and Portugal and even allude to other initiatives we have taken with the govts concerned.
2.
A second point which you could usefully make would be that American warnings against sanctions reses and extreme language in UN comes not from any desire to protect status quo but from our conviction that such measures will not be successful either in obtaining changes in policy of colonial powers or in hastening the process; indeed they could even harden the attitude of powers involved. We believe political, legal and moral pressure is best course for immediate future. We have influence which can be used within this context; and we are prepared to cooperate with them in so doing.
3.
It would also be useful, of course, to get across the point that the USSR has used the Comite of 171 for cold war purposes and that they and we should be removed next year.
4.
I may have some specific suggestions for your meetings later but thought it might be useful to call your attention to this general problem now.
Stevenson
  1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 770.00/9-2062. Confidential; Priority.
  2. The Committee of 17, otherwise known as the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, was established by the U.N. General Assembly on November 27, 1961.