The Senate Foreign Relations Committee withdrew Friday its request to the U.S. government to bring France before the United Nations General Assembly for releasing the Palestinian terrorist Abu Daoud and allowing him to go free to Algeria. Instead, the committee approved a revised resolution asking the government to “consult promptly with France and other friendly nations” to prevent similar situations in the future by which terrorists are released without trial.
The full Senate is expected to take up the revised “sense of the Senate” resolution tomorrow. The House also is expected to act early this week on a “sense of the House” resolution sponsored by 70 members saying Daoud’s release “should be strongly condemned.”
The Senate committee’s original resolution, drafted by Sens. Clifford Case (R. NJ) and Hubert H. Humphrey (D. Minn.), criticized France for releasing Daoud “without affording the governments of West Germany or Israel an opportunity to seek effectively in the courts of France the extradition of Daoud.”
The French Embassy bitterly protested the Senate Committee’s action as intervention in France’s internal affairs and Sen. John Sparkman (D. La.), the committee’s chairman, asked the Senate to withdraw it from its calendar — a move that referred the resolution back to the committee. Sparkman was supported by Sen. Jacob Javits (R. NY) in this action.
UN ACTION COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE
A Javits aide told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that to bring the action into the United Nations would result in a flood of Arab resolutions there commending France for releasing Daoud. Thus, a counter-productive situation would arise, the aide explained.
According to informed sources, Sen. George McGovern (D., S.D.) opposed any resolution condemning France and Sen. Charles Percy (R. III) suggested consultation with French Ambassador Jacques Kosciusko-Morizet about it. Sen. Frank Church (D. Idaho) acting as chairman of the committee in Sparkman’s absence, telephoned the envoy who reportedly urged that the committee suppress any resolution but Church, the JTA was told, informed him that was impossible. McGovern persuaded the committee to delete the phrase in the original resolution relating to the extradition moves by West Germany and Israel.
The revised resolution, to which the committee unanimously agreed, now reads that it is the sense of the Senate that Daoud’s release is “harmful to the efforts of the community of nations to stamp out international terrorism” and that the United States “should consult promptly with France and other friendly nations to seek ways to prevent a recurrence of a situation in which a terrorist leader is released from detention without facing pending criminal charges in a court of law.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
