United Nations
The barbarians take over
Raymond Fletcher
ipn Monday the United Nations General Assembly voted, by a vote of 72 to 35, that ,,,Zionism is 'a form of racism and racial discrimination thus turning itself, in effect, into a propiganda organ of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It is important, therefore, to look back to discover what sort Of organisation it was originallymeant to be, in order to understand what it has become. The United Nations, which began as a Military alliance, turned itself into a Peacemaking world-organisation at San Francisco in June, 1945. Half of the war, of course, Was still on; and the Charter of the organisation reflected, quite naturally, the still unfulfilled War aims of the fighting powers who had Chosen to describe themselves with a term Other than the old-fashioned, and (in the minds of Americans) imperialistically-tainted one of 1914_18. Yet though realism went into the construction of the Security Council, if flew out of the Windows of the San Francisco Opera House When the rest of the organisation was cobbled together. It is astonishing that the Americans, Who produce political scientists of high quality in large numbers and whose technological Skills enable them to make almost anything they can imagine, can so often be so naive in their attitude towards the world outside their ,°Wri borders. But naive they were and they built the UN in their own image. In spite of the
fact that they had more military power, relatively speaking, than we will ever see again commanded by a single nation, they assumed that, as Henry Wallace had proclaimed, the "Century of the Common Man" had finally arrived and that virtuous common men would bring about that universal goodwill which could make a United Nations Organisation work.
So a General Assembly was created, described by Senator Vandenberg at San Francisco as "the town meeting of the world'. It was to be an assembly of equals, in which Luxembourg would have as much of a voice as the United States, and it would have the right to recommend which countries came in and which should be expelled.
But the era of universal virtue turned out to be also the time of the Cold War and the Security Council one of its battlefields. Vetoes were hurled around like javelins and the desire of the General Assembly to enlarge itself without waiting for a Security Council recommendation was resisted by both legal 'and political means. Stalin's death slightly softened the inflexibility of the two strongest members of the Council; and by 1955 it allowed sixteen of the eighteen candidates suggested for membership by the Assembly to come in. This, in effect, was the international equivalent of opening time in an English pub. Though the largest nation on earth was kept out, the American landlords still insisting that China wouldn't behave itself, the rest first trickled, then flooded in.
Seven were admitted between 1956 and 1959. In the following year seventeen joined, mainly former French colonies promoted to nationhood. By 1971 another thirty-two were in and now, since China is on the Security Council and both Germanies are in the Assembly, universality of membership has nearly arrived. Fifty-one delegations were at the first gathering in New York, one hundred and thirty-eight are at the present one. But, in expanding its membership, the organisation has also changed its character. That character is now epitomised in one man. He has been memorably described by Mr William F. Buckley Jr., who clothes deplorable opinions in a admirable prose and who served for a time on the UN's Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee: and he has provided the new UN Man with a local habitation and and a name. He is, writes Buckley in his United Nations Journal (Michael Joseph, 1975), His Excellency Jamil Baroody, the Permanent Representative of Saudi Arabia: Baroody is the most conspicuous figure in the United Nations ... A hundred speeches by Baroody is the ne plus ultra in UN-Sadism. I would estimate that between us, Dino Pionzio and I heard, in the hundred days of the General Assembly, one hundred speeches by Jamil Baroody. One day he spoke six times: at four different committees, and twice at the Plenary. The popular image of the United Nations as the densest collection of oratorial bores in the history of the world is owing as much to Baroody as to the next one hundred senior delegates.
To be boring is not a crime. Nor is excessive volubility invariably an offence. It is what Baroody talks about and the ascendancy he has gained over the Assembly by so doing that makes him as representative as he is repulsive. Let me dip into the world-torrent for a sample.
"There will be no peace as long as this foreign element is among us," said the automated orator in one debate, "a festering wound that has caused the abcess and the high fever. And there will be no peace unless the pus is drained from the body politic and the body social of the Arab world." He was, naturally, talking about the Jews at Lake Success in much the same terms that Hitler ranted about them at Nuremburg. One or two delegates in the same debate spoke in terms of the Preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (". . whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations ..."). But not the Assembly's hero: "Even if the war ends tomorrow, it will be recommenced at a future date, either by Israel or by the Arab States, by the Arab people."
As Mr Buckley rightly asked: were Baroody and the United Nations made for each other? The General Assembly itself has now given the answer by its vote declaring Zionism to be racial discrimination and its obvious readiness to follow the vote by recommending Israel's expulsion from the United Nations. Baroody and his co-star, Yasser Arafat, have the so-called organisation of the so-called world community in their hands. It has been the most successful takeover bid in history; and it has all been done openly and loudly before the cameras and microphones. The guardians of Western civilisation — and I insist that there is such a thing, conspicuous by its absence from all of the seventy States which voted for the original anti-Zionist resolution in the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee — watched it like hypnotised rabbits. Cancerted resistance by the European Community came too late, Like Ben Gurion himself, I am never quite sure whether I am a Zionist or not. I suppose the right of Israel to exist, as I support the right of the Kingdom of Jordan to exist; but since I am not a Jew the question of whether all Jews should go to their historic homeland or not hardly concerns me. But it is not only Zionists who have been placed in the dock by the General Assembly. We are all imperialists now, according to the half-baked demagogues who dominate it. All of us, that is, who foot the bills for aid programmes, the specialised agencies and all the other splendid work that has, I admit, been done by the United Nations since 1946. The United States, for example, the Villain-in-Chief, has paid 64 per cent of the money given to UNRWA for Palestinian , refugees since 1950. How much of their swelling oil revenues have the Arab States contributed? It is well over a century since the last slave was sold in America. Will any of the British friends of the new masters of the 'world organisation' tell me when they expect the last slave to be sold in Saudi Arabia or North Africa?
It is true, as Mr Alvin Toffler told the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May of this year, that 97 per cent of UN resolutions never result in action, that there are some 2,600 non-governmental organisations knitting the world together, largely out of public sight, and that the total annual UN Budget of a billion dollars a year is only 1/268th of `the loose change available to multi-national corporations on any given day.' These facts put the UN in perspective.
But, important though it may have been, so long as it is given even token respect by those civilised nations against which it has set itself, it becomes a diplomatic misfortune to be both European and relatively affluent, as against Israel. It is not 'the struggling people' who have taken over the General Assembly. It is the Barbarians.
Raymond Fletcher is Labour MP for Ilkeston and vice-president of the Assembly of the Council of Europe.
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