A Reborn UN
Under Annan?
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- On too many occasions the UN
has been the big man's whipping-boy. Bill Clinton for one
has kicked it harder than his two immediate Republican
predecessors ever did. Nikita Krushchev banged his shoe at
it and Charles de Gaulle called it "ce machin". Yet once
again we see how in a crisis the big powers run to it to get
themselves off the hook, this time for a bombing no one
really had the argument or stomach for.
Back in 1954 there was the charged
incident over the capture of 17 U.S. airmen by China.
American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even
some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was
asked to intervene and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold
went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou Enlai. It took six
months of negociating but finally the men were released.
Dwight Eisenhower, the then U.S. president, has a whole
chapter in his book on the incident, but Hammarskjold's
central role is almost totally ignored.
It is the same in Robert Kennedy's
book on the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union and
the U.S. came perilously close to a nuclear exchange. There
is only a passing mention of Secretary General U Thant's
letter to the Soviet Premier, Khrushchev, written in the
face of a strong protest by the Soviet ambassador to the UN.
Yet it was U Thant's letter that elicitated a crucial
response from Khrushchev indicating that there was room for
compromise.
In Suez in 1956, in Lebanon in 1958,
in the Congo in 1969 and in the 1973 Middle East war it was
the UN that provided the escape hatch for the big powers who
had put themselves on a collision course. In the wake of the
Yom Kippur war, although both the U.S. and the Soviet Union
had agreed in principle to a cease-fire there seemed to be
no way of implementing it. The situation looked exceedingly
dangerous. Egypt was calling for Soviet help. Richard Nixon
put the U.S. on a nuclear alert. It was fast footwork at the
UN, principally by a group of Third World nations, that
helped break the impasse. They pushed for a UN force to go
in--and, unbelievably by the slow lights of modern day
interventions, it was on the ground the next day.
Hammarskjold was undoubtedly the
greatest of all Secretary Generals. Although elected because
he was an accomplished bureaucrat he matured into a leader
with a mystical feeling of mission.
He attempted to steer the UN into Laos
in 1959 to pre-empt military aid from the U.S. and the
Soviet Union. He hoped that once he got the principle of a
UN presence established it could be applied to the rest of
Indo-China. But the U.S. and the Soviet Union resisted his
effort with ferocity--a tragedy since it could have averted
the war in Vietnam and Cambodia.
He had a better response with Africa's
first post-colonial civil war in the Congo. Hammarskjold
managed this time to persuade the UN to intervene because
both the Soviet Union and America feared the development of
anarchy and worried about the political cost of pre-empting
each other. But when the Congolese government split, with
the West and the East taking different sides, the UN effort
nearly disintegrated. Hammarskjold was considering
resignation when in a final effort to resolve the secession
of mineral-rich Katanga his plane crashed and he was killed.
With this victory in Baghdad the
present Secretary General, Kofi Annan, looks more ready than
any office-holder since Hammarskjold to take up his mantle.
He played the cards dealt with him by the U.S., Iraq, Russia
and France with subtle patience and strategic finesse.
Yet the UN is a pale shadow of what it
could become, as a mediator and peace-maker, not to mention
its work with refugees, nuclear proliferation or the
critical role its ancillary, the International Monetary
Fund, is playing in the Asian crisis. All of these are
strapped for cash, mainly because of America's failure to
pay its $1 billion back dues in the case of the central UN
or to increase its quota in the case of the IMF.
Even though the finger of blame today
is usually pointed at Congress rather than the White House
the denigration of the UN that led to Congress'
disenchantment owes much to Mr. Clinton.
Clinton had taken office committed to
reinvigorating the UN. Candidate Clinton had even called for
the establishment of a small, standing, UN "rapid-deployment
force".
All this was buried in the sands of
Somalia during the UN intervention in its civil war in 1993,
a mission that went horribly wrong when a great fire-fight
led to serious American casualties--18 killed, 78 wounded.
Contrary to what was said at the time only a minority of
U.S. soldiers were under UN command. And the operation that
led to the gun battle was initiated by the Special
Operations Command in Florida. But when it all went wrong
the Clinton Administration cruelly tried to shift the blame,
briefing the press that American lives were lost because of
flaws in the UN command.
Right now the White House and Congress
owe the UN one. Annan got them off the Iraqi hook where
political hype had impaled them. American soldiers' lives
were saved from what would have been an unnecessary war. It
really is America's time to pay up and give this talented
and proficient Secretary General all the support he
deserves.
February 25, 1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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