The Reminiscences of Zafrulla Khan — Page 214
198 REMINISCENCES OF SIR MUHAMMAD ZAFRULLA KHAN during the period that I had been away. I had left the United Nations in the fall of 1954 and in December, 1955, "the package deal" had gone through and was followed by a large accession of membership in the United Nations, mainly from Asia and Africa and later progressively from Africa. It took me a little time to get to know even the leading personalities representing the new members; but I was fascinated by the new character the United Nations had assumed. For the first time, it appeared to me that the membership was balanced. In the years prior to 1955, the United Nations had worn a Western aspect. For us, despite the ideological conflict, the Eastern states of Europe and the USSR, are also Western countries. So also are the Latins. There were very few of us from Asia and Africa. Now Afro-Asian membership was rapidly approaching 50 percent of the total membership. That made a lot of difference to the emphasis that was brought to bear upon different categories of questions. The increase in the membership from those areas did not start new questions and new problems. They were already there. The process of decolonization, for instance, was already in progress and that is what brought these newly independent nations in. With their coming in, the pace of decolonization began to be stimulated and more and more emphasis was laid upon it; that was quite natural. For instance, so many African countries were already free but so many were not yet free, and those who were free naturally could not feel happy - they could not even feel completely free themselves, as we in Asia too had been feeling: we did not feel completely free until our brethren in Africa and Asia who were not yet free also attained their freedom. This is one aspect which the Western powers, especially the colonial powers, had the unity of outlook of the African and of the Asian peoples. I recall, in that connection, the conference on Indonesia that was called by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi in January of 1949, which I also attended. I fell into conversation, the first afternoon, at a garden party which Prime Minister Nehru had given for the delegates to the conference, with the Ambassador of the Netherlands in New Delhi. When I told him my reactions to the last "police action," so-called, that had been carried out by the Dutch in Indonesia on the 15th of December, he said to me, "We can understand a certain amount of reaction in Asian countries over this, but we cannot understand the