from The Talk of the Town
in The New Yorker magazine
2 December 1996(appeared 25 November)
The current American campaign to block the reelection of Boutros Boutros-Ghali to the Secretary-Generalship of the United Nations of the United Nations leaves Sir Brian Urquhart with an unhappy sense of deja vu. Urquhart, who is seventy-seven, was the second civil servant hired by the U.N. Secretariat, in 1945, and through four decades was a close adviser to five Secretaries-General. He was the U.N.'s chief peacekeeper and probably the organization's most widely respected professional. Urquhart has a long memory for superpower high-handedness. "We've been through all this before with the Soviet Union," he said in a conversation last week. "The Soviets violently objected to the election of Trygve Lie, because Lie supported the American action in Korea and then they violently objected to Dag Hammarskjold." The Soviets failed in both cases, and Hammarskjold -- about whom Urquhart wrote a biography -- is now remembered as the most effective leader in U.N. history. Hammarskjold's positions sometimes differed sharply from Washington's -- for instance, over the American-sponsored coup in Guatemala, in 1954 -- but in time, Urquhart said, the American attitude towards the Secretary-General became "We don't always agree with him, but he's somebody whom everybody trusts." The great casualty of the war over Boutros-Ghali, he said, has been this ideal of principled independence.
Since Urquhart, a native of Great Britain, retired from the U.N. ten years ago, he has written a biography of Ralph Bunche and also a memoir, "A Life in Peace and War," which gives a matchless view of the inner workings of the famously byzantine institution. A flinty, plainspoken man, he does not confuse Boutros-Ghali, whom he called "quite an arrogant figure," with Hammarskjold. But he considers the American objections to the Secretary General's prickly personality "overdone," and he is not much impressed with the criticism, heard often in Congress, that the Egyptian diplomat has failed to bring institutional reform. Boutros-Ghali, Urquhart said, "has done a great deal more than anyone in recent years" to cut the Secretariat's budget and reduce its top-heavy staff. He added, "Real reform has to be done by the member governments, and they can't agree on it."
Underneath Washington's state reasons for opposing Boutros-Ghali, Urquhart sees pure political calculation. "You have a Congress in which there is a very strong element that is anti-internationalist, unilateralist, even isolationist -- very xenophobic, extremely touchy, and, I think, very ignorant," he said. The Clinton Administration's decision to dump Boutros-Ghali, announced in June, was thus "a useful piece of meat to throw off the sled during the election. We're talking not just about a person here but about an institution. An I think this is the reason that you have fourteen votes in the Security Council against the U.S. Even countries that don't necessarily think that Boutros-Ghali is the right person -- and I think quite a lot of them don't -- feel that this is an insult to the institution, and they have to stand up for it." The U.S. refused to pay dues -- Washington now owes the U.N. one and a half billion dollars -- has added injury to the insult. What is irritating even U.S. allies, Urquhart said, is the impression that, as the world's only superpower, the U.S. believes that it can simply ignore the U.N. unless its serves its purpose or falls into line. The Secretary-General, as he put it, "isn't supposed to be a member of the State Department."
Urquhart is himself a sharp critic of the U.N., not only for past follies like equating Zionism with racism but for such long-standing embarrassments as the process of selecting a Secretary-General, which he described as "a last-minute, totally untransparent scramble." He agreed that the U.N.'s peacekeeping mission in Bosnia had been a failure, but added that that was inevitable. Where the organization has stepped into the midst of disputes between nations, as in the Golan Heights, he said, it has succeeded in reducing violence to a minimum. "Civil wars are much harder to deal with than wars between states," he explained. "States usually have a considerable motivation to stop fighting -- they need a face-saving device, and we provide one. But when you're dealing with a bunch of plug-uglies, like General Aidid or Mr. Mladic, they don't have any obligation of that kind. You must be prepared to go in, take sides, and use force" -- or not go in at all. Urquhart considers the Bosnian mission "a great face saving device" for NATO, whose members were unwilling to intervene themselves.
The crises in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia represent a new king of collapsing state catastrophe, which the U.N. will have to learn to respond to -- in part, Urquhart suggested, with some kind of "rapid reaction capability." The Canadians have proposed just such a force. And in the more idealistic era of the 1992 Presidential campaign Bill Clinton championed something similar. When it comes the strengthening the U.N.'s role, Urquhart said, "the U.S. has sat on its hands because it's afraid that Helms" -- Senator Jesse Helms -- "will start screaming supernationalism and black helicopters and all that. We're in a silly season internationally. There's a myopic kind of movement which holds that this country can go back to the world before the First World War. But you can't."
