From the Soviet Union, the

People’s Democracies and China

financial and technical aid is being given to the Korean Democratic
Republic in its tremendous task of rebuilding war-devastated North

Korea.

Razed North Korean
city rises from ruins

PYONGYANG,

The famous old city of Hamhung |
on the east coast of Korea is rising
anew amid the ruins. When the
armistice was signed hardly a
building was left standing — 97
percent of the buildings, including
41 schoools and nine theatres, had
been razed by U.S. bombing and
naval bormardment.

Now a university, five technical
and 20 other schools, with a total
capacity of 16,600 students, are
functioning. Three movie houses
and one theatre are giving regular
performances.

During the war the people of
Hamhung literally went -under-
ground, living underground and
working underground in the tex-
tile, rubber and other plants.

Now the machinery is being re-
moved to restored plants and some
industries are already operating
aboveground again. Seven days
after the armistice a brick plant
began turning out bricks and tiles

for reconstruction — its produc-
tion is now 20 million bricks a

| month.

Already 45,000 wooden huts,
brick buildings and other struc-
tures have been built to house the
81,000 people living underground,
the majority of whom are taking
part in rebuilding their devastated
city.

Reconstraction plans call for an
engineering and a medical college,
an opera house, open-air theatre
and many new industries.

French students protest cuts

Thousands of students demonstrated outside the National As-
sembly in Paris when the French government, following a cold war
policy that places the unpopular war in Indochina and NATO arms
commitments first, announced cuts in education. The demonstra-
tion was called by the French National Students Union.

New World
Discoveries
exchanged

Discoveries and advances in tech-
nical Rnow-how made anywhere in
the vast surface of the earth be-
tween Vladivostock and the Elbe
speedily become common socialist
property. :

In Bucharest scientists from
China, the German Democratic Re-
public, Poland and Hungary have
been sitting in joint technical con-
ferences with Rumanian scientists
and leading people in industry.

Information on metal processes,
rice-growing, silk-breeding, penicil-
lin culture, machine-building and
fuel research and a hundred other
matters was exchanged.

* * x

Hungary, which, had little or no
knowledge of underground rail-
way construction work until a few
years ago, is now exporting tunnel-
drilling shields.

When work first began on the
new Budapest Underground in 1949
the first drill shiélds were import-
ed from Germany but were found
too heavy for Hungarian soil con-

ditions. Then shields made in the
Soviet Union were successfully
tried out. However, they were

made of such big steel sections that
Hungarian industry was not cap-
able of copying them.

So Hungarian engineers design-
ed their own shield, which has
proved very successful. The Hun-
garian shield is now not only in
use on the fourteen drilling sites
of the new underground in Buda-
pest but is béing exported to Poland
for the construction of the Warsaw
underground.

a

* *

Rumania’s first plant for produc-
ing concrete and reinforced con-
crete prefabricated parts for hous-
ing and industrial buildings is now
in operation, with an annual pro-
duction sufficient for 2,000 apart-
ments.

The plant is completely mechan-
ised, from loading of raw materials
to depositing of finished parts in
warehouses for shipment.

* * *

In the four years since Poland
started regular trade with China
the volume of exchange between

the two countries has risen seven-
fold. Reis

Exports of capital goods—main-
ly mining and farm machinery and
machine tools—account for 49 per-
cent of Poland’s total trade with
China. Recently two complete
sugar refineries were sent to Pek-
ing.

* * *

Quite a few. original pictures
shown in the recent fine arts ex-
hibition in Budapest now adorn
working-class homes.

It’s all done on hire purchase—
the exhibition management found
interest among visitors from the
factories so great that it introduc-
ed an easy-payment scheme.

Among the new pictures on show
were many showing workshop life
and the splendors of socialist con-
struction.

Soviet Union offers $40 million
shipbuilding order to Britain

LONDON
Hundreds of British workers may
soon be working on a Soviet ship-
building contract, one of the big-
gest foreign orders ever placed in
Britain for merchant ships. Scot-
tish shipbuilding workers are also
anticipating an early start on an-
other Soviet order for fishing ves-
sels. :
The news was given in Moscow
last week when two British busi-

nessmen told the results of their
talks with the Soviet foreign trade
ministry. ‘

The big shipbuilding order, for
which negotiations are still under
way, is expected to go to Brooke
Marine Ltd. and amount to $30-40
million.

It will be for 20 trawlers and
seven factory ships.

In the House of Commons, J. P.
L. Thomas, first lord of the ad-

miralty, refused to say definitely |”

whether the government would or
would not grant licences for the
export of dredgers to Russia and
the People’s Democracies.

A Labor MP, 'S. Swingler, alleg-
ed that orders for three dredgers
from the Soviet Union were divert-

ed from Britain to Holland by the|-

attitude of the Board of Trade,
which had said that licences would
not be granted.

PRIME MINISTER MENZIES

Police tap
MP’s phones

CANBERRA

Challenged by Labor MPs, Prime
Minister Robert Menzies has evad-
ed the charge that his Security
Police are tapping even the phones
of MPs.

The Labor members charged that
Security Police were tapping
phones of MPs and monitoring tele-
graph and teleprinter services.

They challenge Menzies to deny
that instructions had been issued
to record all long distance calls
made by MPs from Canberra.

Menzies evaded the challenge —
but he did not deny the charges.
Postmaster General Anthony re-
plied to those with a red-baiting
tirade. 3

It is regarded as significant and
in the pattern of McCarthyism
that just as the Republican admin-
istration in the U.S. is using the
methods of the FBI against the
rival Democratic party, so Menzies
in Australia is using his Security
Police against the Labor opposi-
tion.

Many POWs

murdered

Over the protest of General Thimayya, Indian chairman of the
Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, Chinese prisoners of war
were marched out of their compounds by Chiang Kai-shek’s agents
on Wednesday last week, hustled into lorries by U.S. troops, taken to
Inchon and placed aboard ship for Formosa.

PANMUNJOM

Thimayya had demanded
the POWs be held until the Ko-
rean peace conference met to dis-
cuss their fate.

North Korean prisoners were
marched out by Rhee agents and
were taken south by train. The
U.S. did not even wait until the
deadline, January 22, to begin
handing the men over to Rhee
and Chiang—although it had pre-
viously declared it would be illegal
to treat these men as other than
POWs until then.

By Wednesday night all the 22,-
000 prisoners, except about a hun-
dred who managed to break away
as the compound gates were open-
ed and appeal to the Indian guards
for repatriation, were in American
hands.

Others who braved the terror of
Chiang and Rhee agents and tried
to escape were seized and beaten
to death in front of the Indian
officers and Swedish and Swiss ob-
servers.

Escapees told of murders in
the compounds until the last
days—how many will probably
never be known.

The Rhee and Chiang agents in
the compounds, whose organization
had been set up when the prison-
ers were under U.S. control, had
long prepared for this day.

While U.S. planes roared over-
head to intimidate prisoners and
Indian guards alike, the prisoners

were passed through an automatic
counting device and finger-printed
to allow them no further opportun-
ity of escape.

In. Formosa Chiang’s_ troops
ringed the northern port of Kee-
lung so that no prisoners could
escape on landing.

All the 7,000 North Korean
POWs handed by the Americans
to Syngman Rhee are to be in-
terrogated to weed out “subver-
sives.”

Those who pass through the in-
terrogation by South Korea’s in-
telligence will be sent for a “moral
and social education” course be-
fore being put into Rhee’s army.

Those judged to be “subversive”
will be interrogated twice more,
and if their attitude is “still un-
favorable” they will then be hand-
ed over to the South Korean Coun-
ter-Intelligence Corps to be dealt
with.

The issue at Berlin

Shall aggressive German militarism be revived to threaten the
peace of Europe or shal! a European security system be establish-
ed to make such a revival imoossible? . The Berlin Conference, for
which the Soviet embassy (above) is one of the two designated .
meeting places, can initiate the first steps toward peace and security
for Europe or it can revive the peril of war in the heart of Europe.

This is the fateful issue before the Foreign Ministers conference.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE

— JANUARY 29, 1954 — PAGE 3