Extracts from a confidential report from Frederick H. Boland
to Seán Murphy (Dublin)
(Confidential)

The eleventh session of the UN Assembly – the longest the Assembly has ever held – came to an end on the 8th March, for the time being at any rate. As you will see from the adjournment resolution, of which I enclose a copy,¹ the session can be resumed on the summons of the President, after consultation with the Secretary General and the General Committee, if developments in connection with Hungary or the Israeli-Egyptian situation render that course necessary. As I mentioned in my report of the 7th March,² the US delegation had asked us to speak in support of this resolution. They anticipated – correctly, as it turned out – that Mr. Sobolev,³ the Soviet delegate, would object to the reference to Hungary in the resolution. They suggested that we should come in after he had spoken to counter his objection and, incidentally, to stress the fact that the absence of a formal discussion on the Special Committee’s interim report did not betoken any slackening of UN concern for the future of Hungary. This plan was followed. Mr. Sobolev spoke briefly and I followed him with an equally brief statement of which I enclose the text.⁴ A few other delegations spoke in the same sense. The British criticised the provisions of the resolution. They didn’t like the idea of giving the President discretion to call the Assembly back into session after merely consulting the Secretary General and the General Committee; they felt it would be better to adhere to the usual practice which involves consulting all member states and requires the assent of the majority. They only agreed to the resolution on the understanding that it would not constitute a precedent.

[matter omitted]

At the meeting on Friday, the Secretary General announced that the evacuation of the Sharm el Sheik and the Gaza Strip had been completed. The Israeli Ambassador and the Egyptian Foreign Minister made brief statements on this announcement, the former emphasising again the assumptions on which the Israeli withdrawal was based and the latter thanking the UN for the support it had given Egypt throughout the crisis. Dr. McKay of Canada made a statement urging the Arab states to accept the existence of Israel as a fact which couldn’t be changed. As I write, the news that Egypt is demanding civilian control of the Gaza Strip is causing grave concern here. People are starting to wonder whether the diplomatic calculations on which the US and the Secretary General have been proceeding are not gravely at fault. In meeting this new crisis, the Secretary General has nothing more to stand on than the second resolution passed by the Assembly on the 2nd February. You will remember how vague and indefinite it was in its terms. We were assured at the caucus meeting by Ambassador Engen of Norway, the chairman of the Secretary General’s Advisory Group, that the Secretary General was ‘reasonably confident’ that the resolution would enable him to handle the diplomatic problems likely to arise following the withdrawal of Israeli troops. It will be interesting to see whether the Secretary General’s confidence was well-founded.