The Security Council approved last night a resolution extending the mandate of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) on the Golan Heights for another six-month period. The vote was 12 to 0. China, Libya and Benin did not participate. The renewal of the mandate was postponed several times in the last two days as a result of a Syrian attempt to have the renewal resolution changed.
Syrian diplomats, backed by the Soviet Union, demanded that a sentence from a recent report by Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, which described the situation in the Mideast as “unstable” and noted the need for a diplomatic movement, be injected into the renewal resolution. Although conceding that the Syrian change was insignificant, Israel refused to accept any change from last May’s resolution to extend UNDOF in order to avoid creating a “precedent” and future Syrian attempts to inject political notes into resolutions that extend the mandate of the force.
The new UNDOF mandate expires May 31, 1977. Sources here indicated that the Syrians will not agree to extend the mandate automatically when it expires again.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly last night strongly condemned the collaboration of all states with the “racist regimes of South Africa.” The resolution specifically named Israel, the United States, Britain, France, West Germany and Japan. While the resolution was approved by a vote of 97-11 with 28 abstentions, a separate vote on the paragraph singling out the six countries was 69-25 with 39 abstentions.
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.
