DIVIDES WORLD PEACE COUNCIL
The meeting of the World Council of Peace which ended in Warsaw. December 3 was overshadowed by the Sino-Soviet conflict. The Soviet bureaucracy was unable to maintain its time-honored custom of preventing a division of the vote and thus presenting a unanimous front to the outside world, The text of the Council's final appeal, approving the Moscow treaty to end nuclear weapons tests--= excepting those underground == won 274 votes, with 42 opposed and 4 abstentions. The Chinese, North Korean, North Vietnam and Albanian delegates were in the opposition. The identity of the abstentionists was not publicized,
Previously, a Chinese draft, denouncing the Moscow treaty as "trickery" was rejected by 230 votes with:38 against and. 18 abstentions.
The existence of an opposition involving almost fifteen per cent of the Kremlin-led World Peace Movement. has thus broken into public view. V. Tchkhikvadze, spokesman of the Soviet delegation, admitted to the press
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after the meeting that the World Peace Movement is “encountering serious difficulties created by the Chinese representatives."
A Warsaw dispatch of the New China News Agency, dated the same day, accused the Soviet delegation of having prevented the Chinese delegation from taking the floor on at least one occasion,
The Kremlin seems in a quandary on how to solve the crisis which the Sino-Soviet rift has created in the World Peace Movement, in many other front organizations, and in the world Communist movement itself. Khrushchev is in-reality faced with an opposition of two kinds: (1) Communist parties lined up with the Chinese or who refuse to condemn the views of the Chinese, This inéludes, according to certain sources, at least twenty parties, among them the Japanese and Indonesian organizations. (2) Communist parties that are willing to join in condemning the political: views which separate the Chinese Communist party from the Communist party of the Soviet Union but which refuse to sanction organizational measures against the Chinese Communist party. This includes again at least twenty parties, among them such important ones as the Ttalian, Polish, Hungarian and © Rumanian, ,
The combined weight of this variegated opposition was sufficient to block Khrushchev's proposal to told a world conference of Communist parties. on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution, . The majority rejected the proposal out of fear it would lead to an irreparable organizational break, Khrushchev was forced to retreat,
Since then there have been indications that the Khrushchev leadership is again cautiously testing the possibility of engaging in new direct bilateral Sino-Soviet discussions on a high diplomatic level. . Probably the Chinese will not reject these overtures, But they made © clear during the session of the Chinese National Assembly which just ended in Peking that they will agree to talks only on the basis of complete equality and the complete economic and political independence of China from the Soviet bureaucracy.
EDITOR OF "REVOLUTION"