The Evening Star (May 10, 1946)
Editorial: Breakdown in Korea
Responsibility for the breakdown in the Korean negotiations is more clearly fixed on the Soviet side than it is in the Paris Conference, because in Korea the agenda did not contain anything not already provided for under a previous agreement between the Soviet and American governments.
The negotiators’ task was, technically, to implement measures for abolishing the boundary, supposedly established as a temporary measure, which bisects Korea from east to west along the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude, and thus reunite the country economically and administratively under an international control commission during a five-year period of trusteeship. At the same time a native Korean provisional government was supposed to have been set up, elected by democratic processes and representing all parties not tainted with collaboration with the Japanese regime.
The commission met on March 20, but the American delegation at once came up against a stone wall of Russian noncooperation. The Soviet delegates refused to implement either of the main provisions in the prior Russo-American agreement. They refused even to discuss removal of the boundary, which had become an “iron curtain,” virtually uncrossable from the American zone. As for a Korean provisional government, the Soviet delegation laid down conditions which amounted to the exclusion of all native elements except the Communists and those definitely favoring the Soviet Union. When our delegation refused to consent to what it described as a violation of “the universally acknowledged right of all peoples to that freedom of expression promised to them in the Atlantic Charter,” the Soviet delegation announced that it had received orders to “stop work and return to Northern Korea.”
Thus, the commission adjourned “sine die,” and another failure and deadlock must be chalked up to the effort at genuine cooperation and mutual understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union.