The UN Secretariat marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by a last-minute withdrawal of promised facilities for Amnesty International’s conference against torture—for fear of offending governments engaged in that activity from Saigon to Santiago.
1There was no outcry from accredited internationalists. Secretary-General Waldheim declined to condemn torture in his commemorative address, and opposition to torture was interred in yet another United Nations resolution of predetermined uselessness. Of thousands of documented cases of persecution submitted by Amnesty to the UN, not one has ever been forwarded for action to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Soviet dissidents have marked Human Rights Day with placards in Red Square and hunger strikes in prison. Their appeals to the secretary-general receive no acknowledgment, nor does Mr. Waldheim utter one word for Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, or for Andrei D. Sakharov or Roy A. Medvedev, whose supreme moral examples may cost their lives. The secretary-general has “no authority” to respond to Austria’s appeal for United Nations assistance with emigrating Soviet Jews.
2A senior UN official informs a deeply demoralized staff that “the United Nations deals in the realm of what is possible, not of what is right or wrong.” Extolling the United Nations’ “moral impact,”
3 the secretary-general calls on history to bear witness—as it will—that he took no position on Vietnam.
There is no such thing as official cowardice. All cowardice—like all true courage—is personal.
I know of no setting where idealism is ridiculed as at the UN, where “realism” and “the possible” are so often equated with conformity and fearfulness, where the personal initiative and public engagement from which all human advancement proceeds are less nurtured or esteemed, no place more remote from acts of intellectual and moral courage, more incapable of distinguishing between discretion and poltroonery. The patron saint of the UN is Pontius Pilate.
With lip service to other values, UN authorities conspired with the State Department in the 1940s and with McCarthyism in the 1950s, and ignored the antiwar movement of the sixties.
In the 1970s, UN leaders preside over a system incapacitated by gross mismanagement, malpractice, discrimination, and illicit government pressures. Performance and principle flagrantly diverge—as when, amid UN proclamations for women’s rights, an internal study warns that “nothing can explain away the massive facts” of virulent UN discrimination against its own female staff.
4 I recently spoke at the UN at the invitation of thoughtful senior officers who, like many of their colleagues, have appealed in vain to authority against the corruption and wasteful chaos in which opportunity is daily cast away.
No amount of such evidence here will arouse UN leadership—except against myself. Nor, far more significantly, will it bring inquiry from professional UN well-wishers, the elders among whom are sometimes as eager as the UN officialdom to deride idealism and deny the public any UN role beyond financing.
The UN is not a private philanthropic enterprise staffed by volunteers, but a world institution where tens of billions in public money have been disbursed by highly paid administrators. A full-scale citizens investigation, of the Nader type, is imperative if, from this shambles, the concept of world authority is to be reconstituted in contemporary, responsive forms.
“The great hopes of all mankind”—which, as Mr. Solzhenitsyn reminds us, were betrayed at the United Nations’ birth
5—not only envisioned publicly an accountable UN instrument but also, necessarily, the vigilance of international jurists, humanists, the responsible journalists acting as agents of stimulus and exposure in order to counter adverse national government pressures. Greatly to the relief of governments, this high potential was quickly broken on a wheel of seminars, social events, academicism, and Establishment contacts totally removed from perspective and actualities; and diverted to indulging, instead of denouncing, an institution where nationalism reigns supreme—just as earlier internationalists, ignoring the urgings of John Maynard Keynes and H. G. Wells, were seduced into promoting the tragic sham of the League of Nations to its hideous conclusion.
While the archaic pattern of nationalism is convulsed in unprecedented physical and social transformations, global power has passed, undisciplined, to technology and the multinational corporations.
It is ludicrous to suggest that the present important UN, conclusively reduced to abject servility in its current Middle East “role,” could regulate such forces. Only direct, unsparing public pressure, soon to be released by drastic events and expressed by an indignant new generation, can now initiate human systems as global as our emergencies. There is no reason, however, why the present travesty of the United Nations—unable even to denounce torturers, or praise the brave—should meantime continue unchallenged, unscrutinized, and unreformed.