The Catholic Times

Stand Against
Colonialism
Wins Backing
WASHINGTON - (NC) -
The demand for the death knell of colonialism made by the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries at their meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, last April echoed throughout the 28th annual conference of the Catholic Association for International Peace.

The three-day session - highlighted by the presentation of the CAIP's 1955 Peace Award to Father John LaFarge, S.J. - opened with warnings that colonialism is very far from dead.

The conference was devoted to the general theme "Africa and Asia in the World Community."

In the lead-off speech, Father Francis Anderson, S.J., director of foreign missions for the Jesuits' New England Province, referred to such colonial policies as the French stand that Algeria is "an integral part of metropolitan France" as a "legal fiction."

He noted that in the whole African continent there are only four member nations of the UN - that "in the councils of the United Nations, the voice of Europe still speaks for three-fourths of Africa's people."

In Asia, he said, less than half of the people are represented in the UN.

Taking up the same theme, Richard L. G. Deverall, representative in Asia for the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee, asserted that the Asian leaders who have come to the fore since 1945 are "one and all dedicated to the proposition that the future of the Far East must be determined by the peoples of the Far East and no longer by the white European colonial powers who subjected them to the humility of colonial domination and degradation."

Mr. Deverall remarked that from the 16th century on, "most of the Far East (excepting only Siam and Japan) was under the authoritarian and forceful rule of tiny European powers who, if they claimed to carry the 'white man's burden,' were well paid for the job."

From 1500 on, he said, the Far East "was wracked, distorted, and changed by the impact of a profit-hungry European colonial civilization."

The AFL's Asian representative - whose talk was delivered by Dr. Charles G. Fenwick of the Pan American Union because Mr. Deverall is still in Japan - said that today's is a new kind of colonialism. "Despite the fact that the British, the Dutch and the French have left much of Asia," he said, "their control remains by reason of the distortion of economies to serve the metropolitan countries rather than Asia."