UNITED NATIONS: Chau-dhri Mohammad Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s new Permanent Representative to the UN, said yesterday the issue of seating Chinese communist delegates in the United Nations was a question only of credentials and should be decided by a simple majority of the General Assembly.

He told correspondents at an informal press conference after presenting his credentials to Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld that “a good deal of confusion” had been created by describing the issue as “the admission of communist China”.

It was nothing of the kind, he said. “China is a member of the United Nations and a permanent member of the Security Council. It is a state that is elected to membership, not a particular kind or complexion of Government. Being a member of the United Nations and a permanent member of the Security Council, the only question about China is; who represents China. It should be isolated from any question of sentiment or whether we like or do not like a regime.” He said Red China should be seated in the United Nations as the rightful representative — “able and willing”— in China’s UN seat.

On other issues, he said it would be “helpful” to bring the Berlin dispute before the United Nations. He said that if the states concerned in the crisis were “to reconcile themselves to have the question discussed here, it might clear the atmosphere and show the way to solving the problem”.

Alluding to next week’s special session of the General Assembly on the Franco-Tunisian dispute over Bizerta, he said the Berlin question was not as simple as this one. The status quo was being insisted upon in Berlin, he observed.—Agencies