Is
Washington taking
advantage of the UN?
By JONATHAN
POWER
November 21, 2001
LONDON - Gung-ho about the fall of Kabul, but wary about
the political morass that now confronts it, the U.S. has
thrown the ball to the United Nations, an organisation
not normally held in high regard in Washington but, as on
past occasions, a useful refuge in times of grave crisis.
Yet if history is any guide, a wave of amnesia about the
value of the UN will fall over Washington as soon as the
matter in hand has been dealt with.
It has long been so. In 1954 there was the incident of
the capture of seventeen U.S. airmen over China. Just as
in the later Iranian hostage taking-taking, 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 En-lai. It took
six months of negotiating but the men were released. The
U.S. president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, has a
whole chapter in his book on the incident but the central
role of the UN secretary-general is almost ignored.
It is the same in Robert Kennedy's book of the Cuban
missile crisis. There is only a passing mention of
Secretary-General U Thant's letter to Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev, written in the face of the strong
protest of the Soviet ambassador to the UN. Yet it was
this letter that elicited a crucial response from
Khrushchev indicating 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 United
Nations that provided an escape hatch for the big powers
that 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 no way of implementing it. The
situation looked exceedingly dangerous. Egypt was calling
for Soviet help; President Richard Nixon put the U.S.
armed forces on a nuclear alert. It was fast footwork at
the UN, principally by a group of Third World countries
that helped break the impasse. They pushed for a UN force
to go in- and it was on the ground the next day (A
rapidity of movement that in the modern age the UN
bureaucracy says is impossible- an example of an
organisation coming to believe the worst that its critics
says about it.)
One wishes, however, that the UN were more than the
sum of its parts, that its secretary-general, Kofi Annan,
could take more initiatives and be more daring. Brian
Urquhart in his biography of Dag Hammarskjold tells of
how it was that a man elected as a steady bureaucrat
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 in the rest of
Indochina. But the superpowers resisted his efforts with
ferocity.
He managed to get the UN into the Congo because both
the U.S. and the Soviet Union feared the developing
anarchy and worried about the political cost of
preempting 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.
Despite the failures- and the Congo was in the end a
hard-won success- Hammarskjold's spirit still hovers over
the East River building. When he died he had more
detractors than friends. Today with the passage of time
he is the icon against whom successors are measured.
It was always Hammarskjold's ambition to widen the
scope of the UN. By the time of his second term he had
become convinced that the world would only find more
stability if the nations of the world voluntarily denied
a portion of their sovereignty and allowed the UN a more
independent role as an active peace organisation. Bits
and pieces of Hammarskjold's vision still remain. It was
during his tenure that the technique of peacekeeping was
developed and lately in East Timor it has shown how
effective it can be, if done properly and not confused
with the heavy application force as it was in Somalia and
Bosnia.
Afghanistan is going to be the fire that tests Kofi
Annan. The U.S. has run to his doorstep and asked for
help- the opposite of what happened with the genocide of
Rwanda when as head of UN peacekeeping Mr Annan appeared
(rightly or wrongly) to be part of a Washingtonian
conspiracy to avert all eyes. Over the last two months
Washington has played fast and loose with the UN- wanting
its votes to condemn the works of Osama bin Laden but
avoiding any legal commitment, by refusing to subject its
decisions on the bombing to a UN mandate.
For sure, the UN and its secretary-general should now
say yes to Washington's request to try and establish an
interim government of unity in Kabul and even to help in
the policing of a peace if one arrives. But a tough
secretary-general who truly measured up to Hammarskjold
would demand a quid pro quo - that Washington play by all
the UN rules, not just the ones that suit it for the
moment.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|