CRISIS AT THE U N

...They were all platonic, or so it seemed, until this session...

...The lobby does not operate with kid gloves...

...Replying to Scali, .speakers of Third World countries were more thoughtful than abusive...

...raw material exporters and have-nots...

...In the following week, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned the oil producers that unrestrained economic nationalism confronts the world with the danger of an economic collapse like that of the 1930s...

...In making his ruling, Bouteflika reversed precedent and the judgment of the UN's Legal Counsel, as well as of most western states, that suspension of a member was a power reserved by the Charter for the Security Council...

...Public rhetoric is privately retracted...

...Algeria emerged from 130 years of French rule with a revolutionary mystique, a small but talented French-bred intelligentsia and a sudden realization of considerable (but not Arabian) wealth in natural gas and oil...

...The western industrial nations, and that includes Japan, who feel themselves so hard pressed these days, would do well to reflect on how much they have in common with different elements of the new majority...

...In every other respect they are not equal...

...The non-aligned played a most constructive role in drafting the Assembly's resolution on Cyprus—as they had in the Security Council in the dark days of October 1973 in devising a breakthrough to UNEF, the UN Emergency Force on the Suez Canal...

...The Arab summit meeting at Rabat only confirmed the Assembly's judgment...

...In fact, there is no legal obstacle to the Assembly's inviting anyone it chooses, however objectionable to some, to take part in its deliberations...

...Some are in desperate straits with miserable governments and insoluble problems...

...His friends describe him as a political animal and his actions as well as his background support the description...

...But it is increasingly inadequate to the multilateral problems of a shrinking globe...

...The member states of the UN are, if one excepts Byelorussia and the Ukraine, equally sovereign...

...If the west can use its immense resources to make it work, it will make the UN work...

...For the past 15 sessions, the new majority, with the enthusiastic support of the small Communist bloc, has adopted endless variations on the theme of anti-colonialism...

...The Assembly brushed aside the objection that it was acting illegally and endorsed the President's ruling...

...the appearance of an artful, dynamic leadership personified by Bouteflika...

...Not only did Israel and its friends see this as insult added to injury, but many others expressed their outrage at the patently political misuse of a cultural organization...

...He has been his country's foreign minister since 1963 and experience has matured him...

...Under all the tactical commotion there is a common interest in a stable world order...

...It is easier to describe how a new working balance will not be found...

...Some representatives at the UN have only sporadic contact with ignorant capitals and the decisions they make under the pressure of their peers in the Assembly are sometimes ridiculous or pitiful...

...The subsequent steep increase in the price of oil suggested that it would never return to the status quo ante...

...When they were the majority, the argument went, they overrode the minority to partition Palestine, to intervene in Korea and to keep the Peoples Republic of China out of the United Nations...

...On November 12th, Bouteflika ruled from the chair that the Assembly's rejection of the South African delegation's credentials, an annual formality, meant that the Assembly did not want the delegation to participate in its work...

...The "Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order" adopted on May 1st by the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly ignored the objections of the industrial nations...

...Algeria took the lead in heading off the American effort by shifting the dispute from the issue of quadrupled oil prices to that of worldwide inflation...

...The small states will not accept a weighted voting system which diminishes them...

...Its President Houari Boumedienne is also chairman of the non-aligned group...

...More importantly, such polarization is not only self-defeating, it is false...

...Rather it is caused by deliberate decisions to restrict production and maintain an artificial price level...

...Some were old...

...Algeria and others proposed that the Assembly unseat the Lon Nol government and seat the regime of Prince Sihanouk in its place...

...If the UN did not exist, it would have to be devised...

...A brief digression is in order...

...Largely, the dialogue has reflected whose ox was gored...

...Each side has contributed its most cogent observations to the diagnosis...

...The Third World is a powerful lobby in the Assembly context and even established governments prefer not to be "isolated" when they are summoned to join in a ringing declaration...

...East Asian states break away from the pack on questions like Cambodia and Korea...

...As Africa's candidate in the normal rotation of the office, there was no objection to the election of Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika...

...Explosive Combination A number of elements—positive and negative—came together at this Assembly in an explosive mixture...

...Several states were surprised to find themselves last fall listed among the sponsors of the Charter of Economic Rights...

...When the Palestine debate began, the Assembly affirmed Bouteflika's ruling limiting each delegation to one statement—effectively silencing Israel after its first intervention except for a ten-minute right of reply at the end of each day, which the Israelis chose not to exercise...

...The crisis of the United Nations is not to be met by structural change, as some suggest...

...In recent years it has reached for and largely achieved an international position out of proportion to its economic and political strength...

...The elements were new: the disarray and unexpected vulnerability of the industrial West in the economic storm of 1974...

...the sense of pride and power in the Arab world after the respectable passage of arms with Israel and the staggering impact of the oil weapon...

...Only Fiji had the courage to demand that its name be with-dawn...

...Speaking for the United States, as much in sorrow as in anger, Ambassador John Scali deplored what he called "the growing tendency of this organization to adopt one-sided, unrealistic resolutions that cannot be implemented...

...There is no alternative even for those who at present do not like it...

...The next day, under the President's personal direction, Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO, was received in the Assembly with the protocol honors of a head of state...

...Arafat used the occasion, among other things, to warn Israel that it might receive the treatment accorded South Africa...

...Had it passed, growing indignation might have blown the roof off the Assembly...

...On the other hand, the Arab states had gained a new sense of power...

...A western consensus which accepts change, without surrendering any vital interest, should be able to make common cause with enough moderate elements of the Third World to prevent further stampedes...

...CRISIS AT THE U.N RICHARD C. HOTTELET Nerves were on edge even before the 29th General Assembly began The 29th UN General Assembly added the General Assembly itself to the list of international problems...

...Change acts upon it as on everything else...

...Coincidentally, although hardly by coincidence, President Ford was telling an audience in Detroit that in the old, bad past, nations had resorted to war over this kind of thing...

...It has been a champion of revolutionary struggle abroad while pursuing a cautious, even conservative course of economic development at home...

...The numerical preponderance of the Third World, for instance, had been growing since the great influx of newly independent states in 1960...

...We who believe in and live by majority rule must always be alert to the 'tyranny of the majority.' Majority rule thrives on the habits of accommodation, moderation and consideration of the interests of others...

...Algeria succeeded in summoning a special session of the General Assembly in April at which the participation of all UN members made it possible polemically to turn the industrial nations' accusations back upon them...

...Washington's first impulse was to bring the industrial oil consumers together to discuss defensive action...

...But the United States, with its own enormous oil resources and its comparative independence of the Arab oil producers, enjoyed a unique advantage...

...When the 29th General Assembly convened in September, Algeria was not only again in the saddle, but also in the President's chair...

...The Assembly convened on a note of warning...

...There is also no point in casting North-South differences in concrete or in helping the mischief-makers by institutionalizing a struggle between the old rich and the new...

...The 138-member United Nations of today is different in many ways from the 31-member body of 1945...

...It has not really illuminated the crisis through which the UN is passing...

...It contains radicals and conservatives...

...What is this crisis and how may it be met...

...What made this more than a procedural decision but one with powerful effect in the real world was that it internationally established the PLO as a separate authentic element in Middle East diplomacy and thereby changed its course...

...Cuba was alone in calling his warning a declaration of war on the UN by racism and colonialism and declaring that the best way to strengthen the organization was to move it out of the United States...

...Economic nationalism is a major issue in which Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Ecuador have emerged as radicals...

...He focused on the price of oil...

...The Middle East war of 1973 and the accompanying embargo had shaken the world...

...When the Palestine resolutions were adopted by a large majority, giving the PLO observer status at the UN and reaffirming the Palestinian peoples' right to national independence and return to their homes and property, some members again saw Bouteflika moving to capitalize on the momentum of success by hastily scheduling consideration of the Cambodian item...

...The Third World is incontestably right in saying that times have changed and that the multifarious world of today is light years removed from 1945's neat appearance of common purpose in the UN Charter...

...The poor and small countries, although hardest hit by inflation, having neither oil nor money nor food, almost naturally accepted the oil exporters as their allies in a showdown with the industrial states...

...The Soviet Union, that great practitioner of power politics, poses as the champion of the developing countries...

...Anti-colonialism was the great rallying cry...

...It is often a strange game full of sound and fury and shot through with cynicism...

...However, to put the question whether the game is worth playing is to answer it...

...They urged other raw material exporters to follow their example and proclaim an "anti-imperialist" New Economic Order...

...But Bouteflika operates as he does only from the base of Algerian policy, and that is a phenomenon...

...This outraged many members, in part because the Assembly was presuming to establish the legitimacy of the government of a member state...

...Much of the play is to the gallery...

...They protested against legitimizing the expropriation of foreign property without compensation, the establishment of raw material cartels and such demagogic gems as the right of "All states, territories, and peoples under foreign occupation, alien and colonial domination or apartheid . . . to restitution and full compensation for the exploitation and depletion of, and damages to, the natural and all other resources of those states, territories and peoples...

...The Algerians' tactical achievement lay in molding this entirely new and bitterly real economic upheaval in the old shape of North-South conflict...

...They make little direct difference, being advisory only, except in questions of budget and internal procedure...

...It still is, but is no longer automatically effective...

...Algeria has given the Third World new vitality if not new direction...

...By this reckoning, the oil producers were simply catching up with the constantly inflated price of food and manufactured goods...

...Paper resolutions can have practical effect and alter the political climate...

...yet, any reasonable solution in the Middle East would profoundly alter what is one of the most important political factors in the world today...

...It is active in the Arab League and has long had special links with the Palestinian guerrillas but is also prominent in African affairs...

...The Assembly ended with the majority asserting itself more emphatically by adopting a "Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States" enshrining the main points of the special session's Declaration over the renewed objections of the industrial states whose cooperation is needed to move it toward realization...

...Mankind's growing preoccupation with matters beyond the scope of traditional bilateral diplomacy—Energy, Environment, Population, Food, the Sea, Space—give the dress (or undress) extras in the international drama a role which the original script had not envisaged...

...Never before, even in dramatic years of conflict and decision, has a session stirred up so much and such violent public debate about its structure, its procedure and its use in a world groping for peace and quiet...

...American Jews, long among the UN's strongest supporters in this country, were turning then-backs on it...

...Bilateral diplomacy outside the UN is and will long remain the way most of the world's real business is done...

...President Ford, making the first foreign policy statement of his administration, told the members: "A majority must take into account the proper interest of a minority if the decisions of the majority are to be accepted...

...Resolutions become an esoteric form of chess...

...The Arab-Israeli conflict unites the Arab world and the Arabs have used their new wealth and influence to attract broad support...

...Nerves were on edge even before the Assembly began, Richard c. hottelet, a previous contributor, is United Nations correspondent for CBS News...

...The Algerian resolution failed of adoption by two votes...

...The others argued that times had changed and that the great powers of the 1950s seem unable to adjust to their minority status...

...and small wonder...

...Because, in the meanwhile, in Paris, the familiar coalition was voting in the General Conference of UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to condemn Israel for its management of Jerusalem, to deny Israel nominal UNESCO aid and to refuse Israel's application for membership in UNESCO's European regional group...

...It had done so before, to be sure, in replacing Taiwan with Peking in 1971, but Peking did control the mainland of China while Sihanouk controls nothing...

...Bitter protest came from those opposed to the PLO or who felt it unseemly that a nongovernmental national liberation movement should officially join the discussion in plenary session...

...The reality of interdependence is the best antidote to cheap histrionics...

...landlocked and maritime states...

...One of them is the proliferation of resolutions ". . . so many shortlived resolutions," sighed Ambassador Louis de Guirin-gaud of France last December, "each longer than the last, and one a repetition of the other—dealing with identical subjects in almost similar terms, virtually unreadable and sometimes not read, even by their sponsors...

...The great powers will not accept a UN in which they have lost the veto...

...Bouteflika is a young man, 37-years-old, the youngest President of the Assembly, with a lively mind and a first-class French education...

...rich, poor and not-so-poor...

...No one could tell what the new pattern would be...

...Kissinger's pointed message: "What has gone up by political decision can be reduced by political decision...

...He warned that support for the UN was eroding in Congress and in the American people...

...UNICEF, the UN Childrens' Fund, an innocent bystander confused by many with UNESCO, felt the cold breath of boycott on its Christmas greeting card program...

...The Assembly voted to invite the Palestine Liberation Organization, as "the representative of the Palestinian people," to participate in the General Assembly's debate on the question of Palestine, the first broad political debate on this issue in some 20 years...

...Righteous indignation is no antidote to a ferment which stems in part from the classic generation gap and in part from the heady arrogance of newfound wealth and power...

...Unlike food prices," he said, "the high price of oil is not the result of economic factors, of an actual shortage of capacity, or the free play of supply and demand...

...The premise was that the world economy had been upset, not by the headlong surge of oil prices, but by the long-term rapacity of "colonialist" and "neo-colonialist" powers...

...Thereafter events moved quickly...

...This broad and bold attack carried the day...

...On October 14th this mixture of elements was ripe for the qualitative explosion...

...If it were brought down, which a collapse of confidence would accomplish, it would have to be recreated to serve its many functions of marketplace, occasional peacekeeper, scapegoat, safety vent, training school and political barometer...

...The new majority is not a monolith to be cursed and confronted, but a shifting coalition which varies with interests, issues and timing...

...Europe and Japan felt they could not afford the luxury of defying their main source of fuel...

...Some saw Bouteflika's role in suspending South Africa as a quid pro quo for African suppbrt in the Palestinian matter...

...Ten years ago, Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser and Nkrumah were the movers and shakers of the non-aligned camp...

...Economic and political upheaval affect all and there are few who really think they can harness the storm...

...No confrontation of oil producers and consumers was possible in a free-for-all charged with all the familiar ethical, historical and material grievances of the have-nots...

...empty and overpopulated...