THE U.N. SLIPS BACK
The U. N. Slips Back A YEAR and a half ago The Pro-gressive published an editorial entitled "The United Nations Is Dying." We borrowed the title, verbatim, from Carlos P. Romulo, who had been a...
...will remain what it is—a frail, foundering vessel overcrowded with men's hopes and under* equipped with men's moral strength...
...But more fundamentally, we are convinced that the long-run hope of Israel and other small nations depends on the moral and political power of the United Nations...
...But it was shot through with the ambiguities that are so common in compromises...
...Israel's right to demand unequivocal guarantees was strongly supported by the fact that the assurances she sought represented, for the most part, a reaffirmation of positions previously proclaimed by the United Nations but ignored by Egypt...
...Nehru's reference to a United Nations guard as foreign troops and his bland reference to Kashmir as Indian territory constituted as arrogant a repudiation of the United Nations as the world has heard from any nation that has drawn the wrath of India's moral judgment at the U.N...
...The United Nations is doing better than it was when Carlos Romulo predicted its early demise...
...We feel that Israel was wrong to reject the decision of the United Nations...
...The first of the two resolutions, calling for the unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces to the 1949 armistice lines—the sixth such U.N...
...Britain has insisted that the explosive situation in Cyprus is nobody's business but her own, and France, with British and American approval, has maintained before the United Nations that the war in Algeria—a war whose international repercussions may yet dwarf the crisis in the Middle East—was purely a domestic matter of no concern to the rest of the world...
...Security Council voted 10 to 0, with Soviet Russia abstaining, to freeze the present situation pending a United Nations plebiscite...
...Unhappily, as we indicated earlier, Israel is not alone in her defiance of the U.N...
...But in this case the United States and Indian delegates voiced contradictory interpretations" of the resolution they had joined in sponsoring...
...The resolution suggested, in effect, that in addition to stationing a United Nations Emergency Force on the Israeli-Egyptian border, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold consult with the two nations in the interest of developing "progress" toward the creation of "peaceful conditions...
...a world organization that tolerated retention of the fruits of aggression would be committing moral and political suicide...
...would police the areas from which Egypt had mounted her guerrilla warfare against Israel and her blockade of Israeli shipping...
...But the second, which proposed that the United Nations Emergency Force be stationed along the Israel-Egypt "demarcation line" of 1949 but provided no clear-cut pro tection of Israel against renewfd Egyptian blockading of the Gulf of Aqaba, barely mustered the minimum vote required for adoption...
...Moslem tribesmen invaded Kashmir, and the maharajah appealed to India for help...
...But so long as India, like South Africa...
...But more recently, in the period following these developments, the United Nations has slipped back almost to the point where Mr...
...Romulo wrote so dejectedly...
...The maharajah's determination to remain independent of Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan was short-lived...
...in San Francisco in 1945, had represented the Philippine Islands at every session of the General Assembly, and was the first Asian elected president of that body...
...demand th.it she withdraw from the two remaining areas she seized by arms—the Ga/a Strip, the narrow coastal rectangle along the Mediterranean, and Sharm el Skeikh, which sits at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula and served Egypt .is the point from which she blockaded Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba until the outbreak of hostilities last fall...
...Its bloc-ridden membership has vacillated and equivocated on the terms of even a temporary settlement of the Egypt-Israeli conflict...
...when it suited their narrow national interests, and 2) by emphasizing their failure to breathe life into much of the unused provisions for peacemaking in the Charter of the United Nations...
...Canada proposed such a solution, but the United States, spurning the role of moral leadership, rejected it on the hard-headed grounds that it could not command the required two-thirds vote in the Assembly...
...And yet Israel, so long besieged and blockaded by an Egypt that rejects her right to survive as a nation, could hardly be condemned as an outlaw for seeking, as a condition of compliance, guarantee that the U.N...
...We borrowed the title, verbatim, from Carlos P. Romulo, who had been a delegate to the founding conference of the U.N...
...produced and enforced a cease-fire in that tinder-box area of the world...
...The Israelis found this language unacceptable on two counts: 1) the stationing of the Emergency Force along the border would provide no guarantee against a resumption of the Egyptian blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba, and 2) because Mr...
...Both sides agreed to a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite, but India has now abandoned her adherence to the agreement, has rejected a Pakistani proposal that both sides withdraw their forces from Kashmir and permit a U.N...
...decisions...
...When British rule came to an end in India after World War II and that vast subcontinent was partitioned into two nations, India and Pakistan, Kashmir was left free to decide its own fate...
...has been subjected to a new round of paralyzing boycotts and open defiance by the nations of the free world of which Mr...
...delegation to that unhappy country...
...to comply with the U.N...
...Although its repeated res olutions—ten altogether—condemning Soviet aggression in Hungary were ignored by the Russian Soviets and their Hungarian puppet regime, the U.N...
...The recent United Nations resolution, sponsored by the United States in company with other nations, including India, proposed a hopeful start toward fulfillment of the conditions demanded by Israel...
...Clearly the United Nations stood on unassailable ground when it demanded Israeli withdrawal from territory seized by violence...
...Britain and France, two other permanent members of the Security Council, violated the Charter when they invaded Egypt...
...Romulo, as fierce a foe of communism as he is friend of the United Nations, argued that while the Soviets were doing their utmost to kill the U.N., "the heart-sickening truth is that the U.N.'s demise is being brought on by the free world...
...Whatever may be the merits of the controversy over Kashmir—and we don't pretend to pass judgment on them here—India's response to the U.N...
...on Page 18 of this issue...
...It is clear that Nehru's reply bitterly disappointed many of his admirers in this country...
...The issue was Kashmir, a princely state lying at the foothills of the Himalayas...
...The U.N...
...Romulo found it fatally ill a year and a half ago...
...resolutions, which ought to have as much force as the current demand for her withdrawal, provided her with much the same guarantees she was now asking—but which Egypt had flouted with impunity for a number of years...
...It provides a forum now for discussion and debate of issues that were taboo a year and a half ago...
...In the months that have followed, especially during the period since the violent eruption of the Middle East crisis last fall, there has been a widespread rekindling of hope that the United Nations was gathering strength from its recurring ordeal by crisis...
...Britain and France, like Soviet Russia...
...Three-quarters of Kashmir's 4,000,000 population is Moslem, but its maharajah is Hindu...
...It is here that reasonable men differ sharply...
...Israel, at this writing, has , efus...
...The resulting hostilities ended in mid-1948 when India and Pakistan accepted a cease-fire order from the U.N.'s Security Council...
...decision was painfully out of keeping with the moral role she has played so effectively in the councils of the U.N...
...So vague was the language of the resolution, the New York Times emphasized, that it "could be meaningful only in conjunction with the statements of its sponsors...
...Where reasonable men fall out is in their judgment of Israel's refusal to comply with the U.N.'s insistence that she withdraw from conquered territory...
...Both nations kept their troops in Kashmir, India holding two-thirds and Pakistan one-third...
...and Israel, like Egypt, continue to use the United Nations when it suits their fancy and to boycott or defy that organization when its decisions conflict with narrow national interests, the U.N...
...But the crudest blow of all came from Nehru's India...
...With powerful assists from the United States and the Soviet Union, the U.N...
...Israel's refusal to comply with the U.N...
...ultimately succeeded in marshaling world public opinion against Communist brutality and in breaking down Communist resistance to the dispatch of a U.N...
...They would agree that clearly the just solution would have been the adoption of a single resolution which simultaneously demanded the unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli invaders a/"d provided equally unconditional guarantees of the enforcement of United Nations decisions affecting the integrity of Israeli-Egyptian frontiers and Israel's right, with other nations, to freedom of navigation...
...Israel buttressed her legal position by pointing to the fact that previously adopted U.N...
...is going to do, demands prior commitments, and, failing to secure those commitments in the language desired, proceeds to flout U.N...
...Hammerskjold had made it clear that in any consultation between the "interested parties" either could veto the Secretary-General's decision, Egypt would be free to resume her "state of war" against Israel as soon as Israeli troops were withdrawn in compliance with the first of the two resolutions...
...guard to take over and has, in effect, proclaimed the annexation of Kashmir...
...And perhaps more important, for the long run, the U.N...
...It was these modest advances that brought a rebirth of hope among men of good-will everywhere...
...But what if the guarantees were not granted, or granted in language so ambiguous as to strengthen Israel's fears that the evacuation of the seized territories might be followed by a resumption of the raids and blockades which imperil her very survival as a nation...
...See "Algeria on Fire" by George W. Shepherd, Jr...
...That power is greatly, if not fatally, diminished when any member sets itself up as an advance judge of what the U.N...
...Mr...
...Romulo documented his harsh indictment by 1) recording the frequent occasions on which the nations of the "free world" boycotted and bypassed the U.N...
...demand on Israel—prevailed by an overwhelming vote—74 to 2, with only Israel and France voting in the negative...
...Speaking to a cheering throng of 10,000 Indians, he sounded not unlike Hungary's puppet Premier Jonas Kadar when he insisted that "India will not tolerate the stationing of foreign troops in any part of her territory under any circumstances...
...The Soviets arrogantly ignored the U.N.'s resolutions on Hungary...
...It has invoked, in the Middle East, at least part of the peacemaking machinery which was rusting for lack of use a year and a half ago...
...For the Middle East, the United Nations, led by the United States, produced a truce proposal whose greatest virtue seems to have been that it was sufficiently vague to command the necessary two-thirds vote in the Assembly...
...Our conviction is based partly on the fact that, for all its vagueness, the resolution adopted represented a considerable advance over previous demands for withdrawal, for it provided for a start toward the position that withdrawal "must be followed by action" to assure "progress toward the creation of peaceful conditions...
...order created the kind of moral and political dilemma for which there is no easy resolution...
Vol. 21 • March 1957 • No. 3
