Divided Koreas, Baltics, 2 Island States Join U.N.

In a striking sign of the Cold War’s end, seven nations, including the three Baltic states and the two divided Koreas, joined the United Nations on Tuesday.

All had been barred admission previously by the U.S.-Soviet competition.

The new president of the U.N. General Assembly, Saudi Ambassador Samir S. Shihabi, declared the new members admitted by acclamation after last week’s approval by the Security Council. Shihabi, 66, who was born in Palestine, was elected earlier in the day to the largely ceremonial post.

World recognition of their independence, in the form of U.N. membership, was particularly sweet to the three former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II 52 years ago.

“We have returned from the war at last,” declared Latvian President Anatolijs V. Gorbunovs.

President Vytautas Z. Landsbergis of Lithuania, the Baltic state that pursued its freedom most aggressively and suffered the greatest Soviet repression for its stand, was so impatient to take his nation’s new U.N. seat that he led his delegation onto the Assembly floor without awaiting an escort by the chief of protocol.

“We, too, have been reborn from the ashes,” he said in his turn to speak, “not just from World War II but also from the toils and faith of its people.”

He appeared bitter about the “brutal coercion” by the Soviet Union and “cynical smiles” from the Western world when Lithuania unilaterally proclaimed its independence two years ago. But in the end, Landsbergis said, as his nation “emerges from seeming nonexistence . . . (it bears) no hostility or vengeance toward its neighbors.”

Admission of the two Koreas prompted rioting in Seoul, where about 3,000 radical pro-unification students demanded that South Korea accept North Korea’s previous position: that both Koreas share one seat at the United Nations. The students, who threw firebombs at police, also called for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from their country.

North Korea, under pressure from the Soviet Union and China, accepted the West’s longtime proposal that the two nations be seated separately.

The Marshall Islands and Micronesia, the other two new U.N. members, were also pawns in the Cold War. The mid-Pacific islands were U.N. trust territories administered by the United States since World War II. Moscow had complained that without U.N. inspection rights, the United States intended to fortify the ocean lands and refused to let them become independent and enter the United Nations.

The new nations bring the total number of U.N. members to 166. Tuesday’s entry was the largest single admission since 1960, when 17 nations, most of them newly decolonized African states, joined.