The report of Ireland’s permanent representative to the United Nations to his superior, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, delivers his account of Aiken’s first (failed) attempt to generate support for a resolution in the Thirteenth UN Session. Recognizing the breadth and depth of opposition, he withdrew his draft resolution and instead requested a simple roll call vote in favor of the second paragraph on 31 October – a modest statement acknowledging that an expansion in the number of nuclear weapons states would be harmful to peace and increase obstacles to disarmament. The measure passed with 37 votes and no opposition, although 44 abstentions were recorded. The Soviet bloc supported the maneuver, while Western-aligned countries abstained.  

The author of the book from which the below excerpts are taken, Elaine Mokhtefi née Klein, is a US American of Jewish origin born in 1928 in New York. She became politically involved there in the late 1940s. In 1951, she moved to Paris, where she worked as a translator for various anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. It was in the French capital that she met Algerian independence activists and became involved with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which was founded in November 1954 and started Algeria’s independence war. She participated in the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Ghana (for which see also the entry on Frantz Fanon’s FLN speech). In 1960-1962, she worked in New York for the FLN. FLN representatives stationed in the United States sought to contact US politicians and officials, and in New York successfully lobbied at the United Nations headquarters during its war against France, as Matthew Connelly showed inA Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Moreover, already at this time the FLN was deeply involved with various other anticolonial liberation movements, as Mokhtefi’s fascinating book illustrates. When Algeria became independent, in 1962, she moved there. She worked in various official capacities, inter alia for the Algeria Press Service. And due to her New York experience and command of English, she often was asked to work with representatives of foreign independence movements, including the US Black Panther Party (BPP), whose presence in Algeria in 1969 and its effect on the BPP’s take on the Arab-Israeli conflict has been studied in Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2018). Many such movements were assisted by the Algerian government, which saw itself as a player in multiple overlapping anticolonial and postcolonial frameworks, including African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism, as Jeffrey Byrnes has shown in his Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (2016). Mokhtefi was for political reasons forced to leave Algeria in 1974, accompanied by her Algerian husband, the former FLN member Mokhtar Mokhtefi. They settled in Paris, and in 1994 moved to New York.

The conversation was about the domestic incidents within Algeria. Zhou expressed China's standpoints on these incidents. Zhou and Bouteflika also discuss the fate of the Second Asian-African Conference.

Zhou and Enlai and Ali Sabry discuss developments in Algeria, prospects for the Second Asian-African Conference, Egypt's tenuous food situation and trade relations with countries such as Argentina, Canada, and the US, and the latest news from Vietnam.

Zhou Enlai and Gamal Abdel Nasser discuss developments in Algeria and the fate of the Second Asian-African Conference.

Zhou Enlai, Gabal Abdel nasser, and Abdel Hakim Amer discuss the coup against Ben Bella, the new leadership in Algeria, and the Second Asian-African Conference.

Nasser and Zhou react to Abdelaziz Bouteflika's proposal to postpone the Second Asian-African Conference.

Zakaria El-Adly Imam believes that there are too many divisions in the Afro-Asian world at present to continue with plans to host the Second Asian-African Conference.

A summary of Zhou Enlai's conversation with Kwame Nkrumah that covered Sino-Ghanian relations, China's status at the UN, liberation movements in Africa, Sino-Indian relations, the Non-Aligned Movement, nuclear weapons free zones in Africa, and the Congo crisis, among other subjects.

Ben Bella and Zhou Enlai discuss a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, the Sino-Soviet split, the Second Asian-African Conference, China's status at the UN, Algerian foreign policy, and developments in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa.