Bending the UN Charter

...Others point out, philosophically, that the shaping of world order in times like these is no rapid or easy thing...

...The UN Development Fund has approved several hundred billion dollars worth of new projects...

...Richard C. Hottelet reports on United Nations developments for the Columbia Broadcasting System...

...Soviet delegates used the debate on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons to make savage attacks on West Germany in a transparent attempt to disrupt the North Atlantic Alliance...

...Once again, as in Cyprus and Suez and at the very beginning of the Congo crisis, the United Nations was able to exert decisive influence only when Moscow and Washington-however different their motivationsfound themselves on the same side...

...WESTERN DELEGATES, most particularly Arthur Goldberg, warned against what they called bending the Charter to the wishes of a majority...

...There is a good case for the argument that until both sides want to negotiate, public debate in the UN would be a fruitless free-for-all...

...Financial difficulties, reflecting the continuing constitutional crisis, remained acute and the future of the UN operations in Cyprus and the Middle East became openly problematical...

...For many of them, as became clear all too soon, that business was to impose their will on the United Nations organization rather than to infuse the Charter with new vigor and purpose...

...The United States appealed to the members and to the Secretary General for help in moving the struggle to the conference table, but did not directly place it before the Assembly or the Security Council...

...Toward the end of the session a whole new set of complications came to the fore when the African countries, with strong Communist support, used their numerical strength to stampede the Assembly on "colonial" issues...

...A Soviet resolution on non-intervention in the internal affairs of states, aimed against American policy in Vietnam, boomeranged when one nation after another spoke out against the subversion and indirect aggression which is the hallmark of Communist expansion...

...To preserve this machinery, the U.S...

...But the 20th Assembly dealt the American thesis a bitter blow...

...a gratuitous attack on the Secretary General's handling of the first emergency and the accusation that he had gone beyond the limits of the Charter...

...The truce actually came about, however, not because of UN efforts but because both India and Pakistan had spent their initial thrust and were appalled at what they saw in the glass of a continued struggle...

...It has no interest in promoting upheavals or "wars of national liberation" but endorses the Charter's purpose of peaceful settlement of disputes...

...But Moscow did not pay and the Assembly sailed into its large agenda as though nothing had happened...

...Secretary General U Thant has once more pointed out that the UN has no role to play in Vietnam at present...

...When the 20th Assembly met, functioning normally with Article 19 set aside to appease the Soviet Union, the United States was entitled to expect either that Moscow would make its indicated payment or that the membership would demand satisfaction...

...The Afro-Asians then voted to override the Charter requirement that important matters require a two-thirds margin and went on to pass another resolution which did several notable things...

...The Special Committee on Peacekeeping, after failing last year to agree on either the principles or the financing of UN operations, was asked to resume its work this month with no prospect of greater success...

...In the days that followed, the majority asserted itself almost without restraint...

...The nations which listened to Pope Paul in the great Assembly hall with every appearance of warm attention then went on about their business...

...Last fall, Kashmir showed how limited the UN's resources were and what was needed for effective intervention...

...or that the inhabitants of the Cook Islands may not opt for affiliation with New Zealand-even if they want tobut must choose independence no matter what...

...Washington, for reasons of its own, complied...

...Beyond that the Afro-Asian temper, with Communist encouragement, developed a more antic qualitywith overtones of a strategy which alarmed European, Latin American and other members...

...But the Africans coldly cut off discussion and killed his proposal in committee, emphasizing that they were in no mood for dealing with Rhodesia peacefully...

...urged all states to support "national liberation" movements in colonial territories...

...In the past, the majority has tended to support this proposition...

...Thereupon, most of the members importuned the United States to drop its insistence on Article 19...

...It was not surprising that thundering, albeit platonic, resolutions were hurled against South Africa and Portugal invoking all the military as well as economic sanctions that the Charter provides for aggressors...

...The African states, particularly, whose nature extends from medieval Ethiopia to the ramshackle neo-totalitarian regime in Ghana, found perfervid satisfaction in their one common cause-first opposing South African apartheid and the Portuguese presence in Africa, then the white rebellion in Rhodesia...

...The glowing, dramatic highlight of the 92-day session was the address by Pope Paul VI, a stirring appeal to the conscience of man, an effort, it seemed, to invoke in terms of 1965 that unanimity of feeling on which the United Nations had been launched 20 years earlier: "No more war, war never again...

...A working group of the outer space committee has agreed to hold a big space conference next year...

...In the field of outer space where increased activity cries out for binding international agreements on the rescue and return of astronauts in distress, on liability for space accidents and on the exploration of space and celestial bodies, the Soviets did not budge...

...The United States continued to argue that since the Security Council may be thrown into deadlock by the veto, the General Assembly must retain ultimate authority to recommend action (it can do no more under the Charter) to meet a critical threat to peace-as it did in Korea and the Middle East...

...air base in the central Pacific, failed of passage only because it did not attract the necessary two-thirds majority...

...In the 19th Assembly, most members were dismayed by the Soviet threat to walk out and destroy the UN if punishment under Article 19 of the Charter were invoked against the Communists for their refusal to pay peacekeeping assessments...

...And they went along on some votes only with the cynical consolation that they would have no practical effect...

...He could have expected no miracles, and he worked none...

...Now it -finds a majority pressing farther afield-perhaps purely from emotion in the pursuit of particular interests, perhaps in the expectation that the United States and other Western nations will seek to preserve the UN as an economic agency and debating forum even at the cost of its political substance...

...The struggle over the nature of the UN, which is reducing it politically to a debating society, to less than the sum of its parts, was not resolved...

...One expert committee, a multiple version of Laocoon and his sons, is coming to grips again with principles and practice of UN peacekeeping, while another forms to take a long hard look at the organization's finances...

...More than 100 speakers took part in the general debate, including one chief of state, Ayub Khan of Pakistan, four Prime Ministers and 68 Foreign Ministers...

...The United Nations was left with the ominous note struck by the Soviet Union in the Council debate...

...Others thought it much ado about very little and in the light of what was accomplished found the torrent of talk, votes and resolutions hardly less disturbing than the barren confusion of the previous year...

...Some diplomats are happy that the 20th General Assembly met and talked as though bygones were bygones...

...Neither the repeated pleas of the Security Council nor the massive effort of the Secretary General brought about the cease fire...

...Few are more disturbed by its division on the peacekeeping issue...

...Moscow restated its contention that the direction, composition and financing of any UN peacekeeping operation could be undertaken only by the Security Council, where the Soviets can exercise their veto...

...Andrei Gromyko passed the word along that if the Soviet Union were not put under duress, it would make a substantial voluntary contribution to meet the deficit...

...This country, having no territorial claims or colonial ambitions, wants a system of world law which confines change to peaceful channels...

...Neither did U Thant, and probably for the same reason: The diplomatic world of the United Nations simply reflects the world of reality...

...The Food and Agriculture Organization has held a pledging conference to cope with a growing world-wide shortage of food...

...But in some of these resolutions and in others the outlines of an apparent strategic aim emerged...

...at the most it did a great deal of talking and votingnot always judiciously-and brought the membership up to 117...

...In a broader context, too, this Assembly has jolted American thinking...

...When Princess Margaret visited UN Headquarters, the African members of the British Commonwealth boycotted a reception for her...

...But on the socalled issue of colonialism, which came to a head over the problem of Rhodesia, they could both unite themselves and join forces with the Communists...

...It was merely grotesque when voices were raised to support Cuba's contention that Puerto Rico is a colonial territory...

...In this case the Soviet Union conducted its diplomacy outside the UN...

...Britain's determination to remove the white regime in Salisbury by peaceful means alone was not strong enough meat for African appetites...

...At the end of the day the western delegates faced what seemed to them a clear determination of the Afro-Asian-Communist majority against "colonialism" to use the Assembly as its instrument...

...The conflict in Vietnam, the great threat to world peace of the second postwar generation, was everywhere but on the agenda...

...And they took special exception to what seemed to emerge as a principle: that resolutions on colonialism do not require a two-thirds vote, however clearly their terms make them important matters...

...And that is about the size of it, unless one chooses to add the latest blooming of the perennial 18-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva...

...The United States believes it has the most to gain from an active, effective United Nations...

...The largest number of items ever on its agenda, 108, led to some 120 resolutions...

...During consideration of an item entitled "Peaceful Settlement of Disputes," he proposed that the Assembly make a broad study of methods and machinery for dealing with international quarrels...

...It was sad when objections were raised to an already feeble resolution bemoaning the rape of Tibet and one African delegate remarked, "What can Tibet do for us...

...The idea of the General Assembly, where there is no veto, as a court of last resort from a Security Council immobilized by great power egotism stands or falls on the existence of an Assembly which has a clear conception of the UN's peacekeeping responsibility and wants it to be used...

...And that Britain was enjoined to leave Oman and Aden...

...This has been all the more painful to the United States because Washington has sought to preserve the General Assembly's residual powers to recommend peacekeeping operations-powers spelled out in former Secretary of State Acheson's Uniting for Peace Resolutionwhen a veto deadlocks the Security Council...

...When Prime Minister Harold Wilson addressed the Assembly, most of the Africans stayed away or left the hall...

...Now, though, it has in effect pushed the United States closer to the restrictive, defensive Soviet contention that a peacekeeping monopoly for the Security Council is necessary for the absolute protection of a great power's interests...

...Some delegates rejoiced that the United Nations was operating again after the paralysis of the 19th session...

...The 20th General Assembly was not exactly a launch vehicle to higher things...

...The nonaligned countries did not bring it up because it was too hot an issue and of no service to their main preoccupation of "anti-colonialism...

...Here, renewed in specific terms, was the essential question that must be resolved if the United Nations is ever to fulfill its promise...

...These were not unimportant, since they provided a stimulus to which the warring parties could respond without losing too much face...

...Several were directed against military bases, without regard for purpose or conditions...

...The United States repudiated the open assault but still entertained the notion-as it did over Kashmir-that beyond the polemics there might be a "parallelism" of Soviet and American interests...

...and most of all because the United States and the Soviet Union were eager to close the door which the conflict opened to Communist Chinese intervention in the subcontinent...

...agreed to bend the Charter by abandoning Article 19...

...On the other hand, Moscow capitalized on the fact that Washington wears its heart on its sleeve in disarmament questions...

...It called for the liquidation of military bases in colonial territories...

...The nonaligned countries, a numerical majority, did not swing behind proposals just because Moscow advanced them...

...And an Arab delegate is quoted as telling an English colleague that there was no peaceful solution of the Palestine problem...

...The Communist bloc would not raise it because of Peking's furious refusal to accept any UN jurisdiction, even as a forum for discussion...

...One, which would have recommended their removal from any of 26 small territories including, not by coincidence, Guam, the big U.S...

...The Soviet Union sought to ride this mood, but had only indifferent success...

...Still others, seeing the sky over the East River darken with bitter, old problems coming home to roost, wonder whether the ideal of the United Nations would not be better served by turning to meet them squarely...

...There is no more devoted proponent of the United Nations as a stabilizing, peacekeeping forceanti-racist and anti-colonialist "than Britain's Permanent Representative, Lord Caradon...

...But in 1964 and in 1965 there was no suggestion of any such philosophy...

...and authorized the rather volatile Special Committee on Ending Colonialism to make recommendations directly to the Security Council...

...They warn against expecting too much of the UN, saying that it will survive and possibly regain political vitality because the effort for effective international organization is today inseparably a part of civilization...

...Moscow evidently disagreed...

...The Pakistani-Indian meeting in Tashkent resulted in a decision while the Security Council resolutions remained in limbo...

...Nothing about the old year suggests that the new one will be either less busy or more fruitful...