The UN at Twenty-Five
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
EARLY PUBERTY, LATE MATURITY The UN at Twenty-Five BY RICHARD C. HOTTELET United Nations Early puberty and late maturity seems to apply widely these days, and in this too the United Nations...
...While that hardy perennial, Chinese representation, will provide a week's debate and speculation at the forthcoming session, there is no sign of anything new on this question...
...But perhaps it is adequate cause for rejoicing at the 25th anniversary session of the General Assembly, beginning next week, that the UN is still there, effective in some ways, convenient in others and preserving the potential that was written into the Charter...
...The political side of the peacekeeping issue centers around provisions the organization should make for contingencies falling between the Charter's Chapter 6, on the pacific settlement of disputes, and Chapter 7, on steps with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression...
...The International Court of Justice had run out of cases when Finland recently persuaded the Security Council to ask it for an advisory opinion on Namibia (Southwest Africa), largely to preserve the Court from atrophy...
...The disciplined Communist bloc took the well-meaning, disorganized and distressingly uninterested or stupid participants from other countries to the cleaners...
...Everyone is acutely aware that the latest cease-fire on the Suez Canal expires November 5—if it lasts that long—and that its continuation depends on the degree of progress in the discussions Israel, Egypt and Jordan hold under Jar-ring's auspices...
...The Assembly will consider what might be done to enhance its effectiveness...
...They are: comprehensive disarmament (as remote as before...
...The Soviet Union's arrears, therefore, have been growing from year to year and will inevitably reach the point where Article 19 (loss of vote in the General Assembly for a member whose arrears equal the most recent two years' assessment) will once again apply...
...and resolving the question of where that leaves Berlin may be the next international drama...
...It is the business of multiple contact, with almost instant reactions across the spectrum of geography and politics...
...The World Youth Assembly, held in July as an opportunity for the generation born since 1945 to speak its mind on the UN and the world, was a fiasco...
...but neither has it justified the cynical contempt of those too far behind the times to recognize a shrunken, independent world community's need for a global standard of right and conduct...
...Since Moscow, as a cochairman of the Geneva Conference, refuses the British cochair-man's request to join in summoning it or any other international conference, there is not likely to be any meaningful multilateral discussion...
...in the offices of Secretary-General U Thant's Special Representative for the Middle East, Gunnar V. Jarring, in the diplomatic missions and in the hotel suites of the foreign ministers...
...It, too, keeps turning...
...the time does not seem ripe for the definition of a system that will insure a realistic equality of opportunity coupled with benefit for all...
...But comprehensive action, to the extent that there is any, will take place outside the Assembly hall and committee rooms Richard C. Hottelet reports on United Nations developments for the Columbia Broadcasting System...
...Environmental pollution as an object of international action awaits further examination at a conference in Stockholm next year...
...With regard to the university, it does not want patriotism diluted by supranational loyalties, and it professes to see a serious hazard that UN volunteers might come to resemble what a Soviet delegate called "discredited" organizations like the U.S...
...Certain aspects of it, such as Palestinian refugees, human rights and the acquisition of territory may be brought formally to resolution...
...One bright anniversary idea has already exploded like a practical-joke cigar...
...The Western powers can block that with their veto, if necessary...
...Except for the last-minute insertion of concern for Czechoslovakia into one of the youth Assembly's final documents, its conclusions and recommendations read like the front page of Pravda—even to the explicit endorsement of compulsory military service...
...The organization is still coping with it, in quiet resignation, on two levels—financial and political...
...The UN has not satisfied men whose hope and faith demanded so much...
...Moscow has not to this day paid one kopek on that account, and has continued to withhold portions of its assessment for the regular UN budget which would be used for peacekeeping functions like the UN Field Service and the UN Commission on the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea...
...Diplomats will not go home with agreements bulging their briefcases, but they will have learned— and this is especially valuable for the smaller nations—a great deal more about the temper of the times and the men who set it...
...More attention will center upon these talks than on any of the more than 100 agenda items...
...The Soviet Union, taking its cue from Hanoi and Peking, asserts that this is not a topic for the United Nations but for the Geneva Conference...
...East Germany may very well be in New York in 1971...
...The basic problem is to find an acceptable formula for authorizing such actions...
...The situation in the Middle East" is on this Assembly's agenda as it has been on that of the previous three, only as a technicality...
...Sudan and Iraq have joined...
...Secretary of State William P. Rogers devised a plan for peace talks and a cease-fire, then exercised the bold diplomacy that got the key parties moving...
...It is no more than standard operating procedure that Bonn, after all the exchanges of smiles, signatures and promises of better relations with the East in Moscow, should be quietly asking its Western allies, especially the United States, to stand firm in keeping Ulbricht out of New York...
...International standards governing the exploitation of the seabed's mineral wealth are still being discussed in the light of the technical lead of the big powers and the moral right of the small...
...But the plan functioned in the framework of the Security Council's November 1967 resolution, obtaining for the first time explicit acceptance by Egypt of Israel's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and by Israel of the principle of withdrawal from occupied Arab territory...
...friends of the Maoist regime and the neutral proponents of a Two China membership cannot break it down...
...No matter of worldwide concern is unpolitical...
...Exploiting the vagueness of West Germany's new Ostpolitik, which has given the German Democratic Republic recognition as a state, the Soviet bloc may try this year to revive an earlier campaign to bring Walter Ulbricht officially onto the world stage at the UN...
...But the thrust of the effort is likely to be the same as before...
...a draft treaty to ban nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction from the seabed (here some slight progress may be registered...
...The financial implications of the Soviet Union's refusal to sanction UN peacekeeping efforts that do not suit its interests, let alone pay for them, exploded in the crisis over Article 19 in 1964...
...Points of agreement have evoked official satisfaction in Washington, yet the fact remains that they are fragmentary and inconclusive...
...But vested interest and encrusted habit are expected to combine with ceremonial ritual at this anniversary session to inhibit any radical, rational surgery...
...EARLY PUBERTY, LATE MATURITY The UN at Twenty-Five BY RICHARD C. HOTTELET United Nations Early puberty and late maturity seems to apply widely these days, and in this too the United Nations reflects the human condition...
...Observer status, similar to West Germany's, is not easily obtainable either...
...At the end of the session, the XXV Assembly's main specific achievement may be found to consist of the admission of Fiji as the United Nations' 127th member...
...The two are very likely to become entwined...
...There is no question of East German membership in the UN...
...This condition remains Peking's irreducible minimum, though...
...As for the conflict in Southeast Asia, once again it will not formally come before the General Assembly...
...Debate will certainly range across the entire subject...
...The work of the committees tends to be unbalanced...
...The condition of the world's legal tribunal is itself a subject of concern...
...a ban on production, testing and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons (toward which the United States is ready to move on biological weapons alone, while the Soviet Union insists on coupling the two categories...
...One is the appearance of national leaders on a scale not seen since the great Assembly of 1960—including President Nixon and, quite possibly, Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin of the USSR...
...The UN's time has clearly not arrived...
...The United States wants to see the General Assembly empowered to act in case the Council is paralyzed by the veto, and it would give the Secretary-General authority to lead the operation under broad directives...
...The United States then backed away from this matter of principle, largely on the strength of Foreign Minster Andrei Gromyko's assurance that the Soviet Union would make a voluntary contribution to restore the organization's solvency...
...Peace Corps...
...With this problem totally unresolved, a Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations has been working five years to draft guidelines for the composition and management of whatever forces may be authorized in the future...
...one of its members, the United States, broke the long Middle East deadlock...
...Two things will dominate the XXV General Assembly in highly characteristic fashion...
...Disarmament is an even older carousel...
...At the age of 25, it has been involved in all the storm and stress of the postwar world yet appears as little able to master its problems today as it was at birth...
...Programs involving youth, such as the establishment of an international university and a UN volunteer group to help in development activities, have encountered the skepticism of the Soviet Union...
...There would be an instant majority for seating Peking if the standard demand that Taiwan simultaneously be expelled were dropped...
...Bonn and its western allies have so far kept Pankow out of the UN family...
...A smaller enterprise of this kind came to fruition last spring, when Britain and Iran made it possible for U Thant (over Soviet procedural objections, incidentally) to defuse a political time bomb in the Persian Gulf by certifying that the people of Bahrein had no desire to be absorbed by Iran...
...Meanwhile, the UN is living from hand to mouth with each spring payday, before the main part of the dues comes in, seeing the wolf howling at the door for the secretariat staff...
...For the most part, however, the work of this Assembly will follow more familiar patterns of maneuver and conflicting interests...
...It is worth noting that the UN was not the initiator in this case...
...One gauge of how low the UN's capacity for action has sunk is the question of peacekeeping...
...This includes such far-reaching issues as disposing of the wealth below the oceans, environmental pollution and liability for damages resulting from space exploration...
...The UN is not demeaned when it serves as the agency for the peacemaking efforts of a member state in the spirit of the Charter...
...So far each of the UN's peacekeeping operations, from Kashmir to Cyprus, has been sui veneris...
...Four main questions are before this Assembly, through the work of the 25-nation Conference of the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva...
...The Soviet Union continues to demand total Security Council control not only over their start but also over the means involved— political, personal and financial— and their day to day conduct...
...While some foreign ministers and especially prime ministers may come solely for the ceremonial week (extending from October 14 to the 24th, the day the Charter came into force), most will come to do the kind of business that cannot be done better anywhere in the world...
...Cambodia has departed the list of members who have been sponsoring the item, "Restoration of the Lawful Rights of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations...
...The other is the problem of the Middle East, which paradoxically will almost certainly not be actively on the agenda...
...Spelling out liability for space accidents is being held up largely by the Soviet Union's refusal to subject its sovereign rights to any kind of international adjudication...
...In the case of the Middle East, the convocation provides the opportunity for those diplomats who want peace to work for it directly, quickly and discreetly...
...Victor Hugo wrote that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come...
...But the Ostpolitik has blurred many distinctions, where it has not erased them altogether...
...According to precedent, an observer state must be generally recognized and must be a member of UN bodies, such as the regional economic commissions and the specialized agencies...
...This question is relevant to the Assembly's own proceedings, and an effort is being started to simplify the overlapping and intertwined agenda items that consume time out of all proportion to significance and result...
...a total ban on nuclear testing (still stranded on the issue of verification...
Vol. 53 • September 1970 • No. 17
