Notebook
Like so many organisations dedicated to noble causes, Amnesty International seems to handle its own internal affairs in a Particularly inept and nasty fashion. The Jeremy Thorpe fiasco was a perfect illustra- tion of this. Now I have another example. It Is the case of Mr Bohdan Nahaylo, Amnes- ty's researcher on the Soviet Union, to whom I consider a real injustice has been done. Mr Nahaylo was forced to resign at the beginning of this month on grounds of Serious misconduct'. This misconduct con- sisted of writing articles for the Spectator r,which, according to Amnesty's Secretary- General, Mr Thomas Hammarberg, had damaged the organisation's political impar- tiality and 'jeopardised our vital work'. These charges are worth closer examina- tion. Amnesty is dedicated to the cause of thousands of people throughout the world who are imprisoned for their political or religious opinions. Its work involves gather- Mg information about such prisoners, pub- helsing their cases, and putting pressure on governments to obtain their release. In the ease of Amnesty, political impartiality does not mean staying out of politics; it means hounding oppressive governments of all Political complexions with equal vigour. Mr Nahaylo has been hounding the Soviet Union, both in his work at Amnesty and in the articles he has been contributing to the Spectator over the past year and a half. His articles for us, and for other publications, have been almost exclusively concerned with the oppression of dissidents and other minorities in the Soviet Union, a natural ex- tension of his Amnesty work. Unlike other members of Amnesty, including the Secretary-General, who have also written for newspapers and magazines in their per- sonal capacities, Mr Nahaylo has always gone out of his way not to identify Amnesty With his own views (his membership of Amnesty was, alas, once mentioned in Spectator against his instructions and he wrote to his superiors apologising for this). Nor has he, like some others, engaged in Political controversy; two years ago, for ex- ample, Miss Pat Arrowsmith, describing herself as 'an editorial assistant with Amnesty International', wrote an article in The Times under the heading 'Why we de- mand that the army leave Northern Ireland'. She was not sacked for that, nor have any other Amnesty employees been sacked for writing articles, there being no _rule in Amnesty against freelance writing. what makes Mr Nahaylo's dismissal all the more perplexing is that although his articles had been appearing for some 18 months, none of his superiors expressed any concern until January this year. He then stopped contributing to the Spectator, hoping to be told what sort of writing was permissible and what was not. But he was given no guidelines. He was sacked instead. Under pressure from him and his lawyer, Mr Ham- marberg would offer only the vaguest reasons for this abrupt decision. He specifically cited only one article as objec- tionable: an obituary of the Soviet leader Mikhail Suslov, in which Mr Nahaylo com- pared Suslov's loyalty to Stalin with that of a faithful dog. 'The tone of the whole arti- cle,' wrote the triumphant Mr Ham- marberg, 'is clearly political'. But the most important questions remain unanswered: Why did nobody object to Mr Nahaylo's journalism before? What evidence was there that he had jeopardised Amnesty's work? Had anyone complained? Had exter- nal pressure been brought to bear? Until a few weeks ago, the head of research at Amnesty was a former member of the Australian Communist Party, Mr Derek Roebuck, who maintained regular contact with the Soviet Embassy and spent his sum- mer holidays in Russia. Why did his con- duct not raise questions of damage to Amnesty's political impartiality? In any case, was Mr Nahaylo's offence so grave that he could not be kept in employment even if he abided by guidelines set by his superiors? Mr Hammarberg, for unexplain- ed reasons, decided that it was. But this did not prevent him from giving Mr Nahaylo a glowing reference stating that during his three and a half years with the organisation, his work 'was invariably up to Amesty In-
ternational's standards'. A rum business.
Claus von Bulow, Lord Lucan, John Aspinall, Sir James Goldsmith: what do they have in common? Not murder, of course, except in the first two cases, though Mr Aspinall's tigers do have a lot of blood on their paws. No. It is just that they seem to have quite a few characteristics in com- mon: physical size, wealth, vanity, ar- rogance, and what the popular newspapers like to call 'charm and wit'. Even without having any evidence for it, one feels perfectly confident that they all know each other and would probably describe each other as friends. 1 can imagine John Aspinall now, at some dinner table, boom- ing away in a solemn voice about the injustice done to von Bulow and attributing to him, as he did to Lucan, the old Roman qualities of `dignitas' and `gravitas'. Von Bulow seems to be the greatest fantasist of them all, disowning his Danish family name of Borberg because his father was a Nazi col- laborator, but curiously replacing it with a name implying membership of the Prussian aristocracy. More revealingly still, he christened his daughter Cosima — Cosima von Bulow being, of course, the wife of Richard Wagner.
Mr Rupert Murdoch's fingers are always drumming the table. He is an extremely impatient man. As a result, his decisions are hardly made before they are implemented. This is not necessarily the best way of doing things. If he had been prepared to wait just a little, he could perhaps have allowed Mr Harold Evans to give up the editorship of The Times with greater dignity and he might have avoided the fiasco of the past week. It was all very bad luck on Mr Evans, who is a nice man and who probably would not have aspired to editing The Times in the first place if Mr Murdoch had not pushed him into it. He is also a sentimental man, used to being `banged out' and 'banged in' by printers and to enjoying the affection of his staff, even of those journalists who do not specially admire him. The venom that has been dripping all over the Grays Inn Road in recent days must have greatly distressed him. It is amazing how badly journalists behave in a crisis. They egg each other on to ever greater heights of perfidy. The most extraordinary development of all was the emergence of my friend Mr Geoffrey Smith as head of the 'dirty tricks' department. He must have been provoked beyond en- durance, for Mr Smith is about the last per- son in the world one would expect to court this sort of publicity: a Times leader writer of the old school, serious, conscientious, white-haired, and self-effacing. Yet it was he who, like some Woodward or Bernstein, leaked to the press a couple of confidential memos purporting to prove that Mr Evans was toadying to his proprietor. Faced by such an improbable enemy, Mr Evans crumpled and resigned. Thank heavens we have a Douglas-Home to pour a little oil on these troubled waters.
T was surprised to read that the editor of 1 the Washington Post, Benjamin Bradlee, had offered Harold Evans a job, for when I saw him in Washington three months ago he was complaining bitterly about how over-staffed his newspaper was. The paper had recently taken on some 80 writers from the defunct Washington Star, and nobody knew what to do with them. But Tuesday's Guardian put the record straight. Asked by a Guardian reporter to confirm his offer to Mr Evans, Mr Bradlee replied: 'When I was asked whether I would employ him, I answered rhetorically.'
Alexander Chancellor
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