Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Double Standard at The United Nations In His inaugural address, President Eisenhower declared that in the United Nations "rests the best hope of...
...This is not the first time—although it is the most significant—that the UN has failed to act...
...There was no Hungarian civil war...
...Confronted with this challenge to every principle of justice in its Charter, what did the UN do...
...In the light of all this, there is an element of hair-raising hypocrisy in the suggestion that the UN should impose sanctions on Israel for refusing to evacuate the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba shoreline without firm guarantees that the former will not be used for guerrilla raids and the latter for blockading Israel's Negev port of Elath...
...This is all the more obnoxious because it worked to the disadvantage of our friends and to the advantage of our enemies...
...The course which the UN actually followed, with U.S...
...It was not the contemptible regime of Janos Kadar that called in the Soviet troops...
...and UN Middle East policy has been exclusive concentration on the presence of Israeli, British and French troops on Egyptian territory, without paying the slightest attention to the almost unbearable provocation which Israel had received over many years and to the grave provocation Britain and France had sustained...
...In the case of Hungary, the UN was faced with an act of flagrant aggression against a people struggling for freedom and an international status of neutrality...
...On this issue, as on many others, the basic flaw in U.S...
...This would have been bad enough, but what happened was much worse...
...Dust is still gathering on the 1951 UN resolution censuring Egypt for denying Israel free passage in the Suez Canal...
...Virtually nothing...
...Such a deal should have included a firm, permanent settlement of conditions for the free use of the Suez Canal (irrespective of the caprices of the Egyptian Government), free access of Israeli shipping to the Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, some kind of international administration of the Gaza Strip (which has never historically been part of Egypt), strengthened UN border patrols, and a vigorous resettlement program for the Arab refugees...
...Nothing...
...support, can only be interpreted as a double standard of morals...
...There were painful memories of the pressure put on the Czechs before and after Munich, on the Poles before and after Yalta, when President Eisenhower indicated his support of UN sanctions against Israel...
...India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is also in prolonged contempt of a UN ruling favoring a plebiscite in Kashmir, an area in dispute between India and Pakistan...
...There would be moral warrant for such sanctions only if the UN proposed a fair pacification scheme, and if this scheme were accepted by the Arab states and rejected by Israel...
...It is good to see Republican Senators like Knowland and Bridges lining up with Democrats in protesting the injustice of sanctions directed solely against Israel...
...It is unfortunate that the word "revolt," so often used in describing what happened in Hungary, gives the impression that the Soviet intervention was merely a case of helping an established government put down a rebellion...
...A legitimate Hungarian government, headed by a veteran Communist, Imre Nagy, who had been affected by the rising tide of freedom among his countrymen, was attacked and destroyed by a large-scale invasion of Soviet tanks...
...Nehru has behaved in Kashmir, where he has long had military control of most of the area, like the most unregenerate imperialist...
...This recalls Winston Churchill's warning that the UN should not become "a shield for the strong and mockery for the weak...
...There has been no proposal to apply sanctions to Egypt...
...There were a number of condemnatory resolutions, but there was no follow-up...
...After repeatedly refusing a free plebiscite under UN supervision, he has now annexed Kashmir...
...There was not even a suggestion that common decency required the UN to expel a member which had defied it on innumerable occasions, with Hungary as the climax...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Double Standard at The United Nations In His inaugural address, President Eisenhower declared that in the United Nations "rests the best hope of our age for the assertion of that law by which all nations may live in dignity...
...But the sorry UN record in dealing with both the Middle Eastern and the Hungarian crises does not warrant this appraisal...
...What the UN really stands for is a double standard of international morality...
...it was the Soviet troops that installed the Kadar regime...
...There was only the brutal suppression of workers and students who, with rare courage and devotion, had affirmed their passionate will to be done with the role of a Soviet satellite and restore their historic ties with European civilization...
...There was no refusal of credentials to delegates of the unrepresentative Kadar regime...
...There was no suggestion of economic sanctions...
...What the United States should have recommended to the UN was a package deal under which the evacuation of foreign forces from Egypt would have been made conditional on redress of the grievances which caused this military intervention...
...What has the UN done...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 9
