At Tehran, in 1968, the United Nations held an International Conference on Human Rights, with funds and facilities provided by the shah. The shah himself delivered the opening address on the sanctity of human rights. The shah’s sister Princess Ashraf presided over the conference. The United Nations secretary-general, U Thant, in thanking “His Imperial Majesty” for his beneficence, found it “very fitting” that the conference should take place in Iran, and went on to condemn “massacres, tortures, arbitrary arrests, cruel detentions, and summary executions” in far-flung and unspecified areas of the globe.
1Over decades of the shah’s rule, UN organs availed themselves of special donations from the Pahlavis for costly and unproductive verbal exercises in the promulgation of “rights,” and in return enabled Pahlavi nominees to preside over numerous UN human rights gatherings.
2 Throughout that time, UN officials mercilessly ignored a huge body of verified information on political persecutions and atrocities in Iran, and many thousands of appeals from the shah’s victims. In accordance with UN procedure, such appeals were either referred back to the offending government for “comment” or considered by the UN Commission on Human Rights—over which ineffable body Princess Ashraf for a time presided.
In March 1980 the recently established UN commission of inquiry returned from Iran empty-handed, leaving behind the American hostages as well as their own expressions of horror at the shah’s atrocities. The commission assured mutilated survivors that “the international community will know to what unimaginable lengths the violations of human rights were carried in this land…. Your sacrifice will not have been in vain.”
3 Commission member Adib Daoudy of Syria, who has proclaimed that approximately 90,000 people died in the shah’s torture chambers (though he headed Syria’s delegation to Tehran in 1968), declared: “It’s awful. It’s dreadful.”
4Despite such protestations, the UN’s unwillingness to deliver on its promises remains unchanged. In January, Secretary-General Waldheim left Tehran promising to “do whatever we can to ensure that this mutilation of human beings will never take place again.” Yet once safely home, Waldheim expressed through his wife—in a grotesque interview with the
Washington Post—his determination never to say “a bad word about the shah. Whatever he did was his problem.”
5In keeping with the modern revolutionary pattern, “rights” emptily promised have been claimed in deadly earnest. The UN, far from being “our best hope for peace,” has contributed to the escalating violence and violation by its refusal to give any effective voice to the grievances of populations, minorities, or individuals.
6Acting at the direction of its member governments, the UN has a capital interest in preventing political complainants from obtaining a proper hearing, let alone redress. United Nations performance in the human rights field since the organization’s inception plainly shows that UN “rights” organs have been maintained to short-circuit charges of government abuse and to screen violations from public view—as in Iran in 1968, where the babble in the conference hall was employed to drown out unseemly sounds from the adjoining torture-chamber; or, as in the case of Chile in the period following Allende’s death, when an East-West bargain was struck in the UN Human Rights Commission to minimize reports of torture in Chile in exchange for silence on Soviet dissidents.
7The few—and so far largely procedural—improvements in the recent performance of the UN Human Rights Commission are related to the emergence, and contrasting efficacy, of private rights groups such as Amnesty International, which, together with the very intensification of world violence, have increasingly exposed UN delinquency.
Like all UN organs, the UN bureaucracy is subservient to the demands of national authorities, whatever their insensitivity to explicit UN principles. Kurt Waldheim felt able to extol the Pahlavis’ “humanitarian ideals” and able to ignore their atrocities as long as the shah was acknowledged head of a munificent UN member government—supported by the United States, a member nation more powerful still. With the shah’s fall, “authority” in Iran devolved on the present factions, and the UN leadership, in unabashed reversal, declared its moral outrage and set up its commission of inquiry. Were the Pahlavis to regain power, we might expect to see—under the UN Vicar-of-Bray syndrome—a UN tribunal investigating the plentiful abuses of the ayatollah. I have seen no suggestion that the UN commission of inquiry might more usefully have been set up while the shah’s abuses were in progress in Iran, although this is precisely the type of investigation undertaken, with scant funds at considerable risk, by private human rights agencies.
Far from displaying humility over his misstatements and failures in the Iranian crisis, Kurt Waldheim “expressed scorn,” according to the
New York Times, “for critics who, in his view, had not devised any other approach. ‘Nobody has offered me any alternative.’”
8 This critic has in fact been proposing, for a decade, specific measures by which the UN Secretariat could set about acquiring, however tardily, the stature and credibility needed for effective mediation. Every thinking member of the UN staff is aware that proper alternatives to UN debility propose themselves daily and are repudiated by the UN administration as incompatible with the corrupt forms in which the organization has established itself.
The UN has set itself against recognizing, let alone profiting from, the context in which the Iranian experience is taking place. Just as, at a recent press conference, Jimmy Carter dismissed as “ancient history” a question as to whether current events demonstrated past errors in American policy in Iran, so the UN cultivates amnesia toward its own responsibility.
9 “Responsibility” is not a word in use at the UN.
Over the past year or two, deputations of concerned UN employees have approached the “more serious” member governments, through their UN mission, in an attempt to gain support for essential reforms. The response of these governments may be summarized as follows: we are aware of the deplorable condition of the UN Secretariat, and of its adverse effect on the organization’s under taking: but we are not disposed to make—in the words of one representative—“the expenditure of political capital necessary to effect the required reforms.”
10 In other words, the United Nations’ ineffectuality, so deeply the product of governmental intentions, will continue to satisfy even its “more serious” members until global violence passes the bounds of any conceivable form of international mediation. This attitude, however, assumes that UN services can be allowed to deteriorate indefinitely without attracting public attention, and that the UN staff body will continue to tolerate a degree of maladministration and injustice scarcely definable as civilized. In fact, the government of Belgium is transferring its contribution for Cambodian relief from the UN to effective private agencies, such as Oxfam.
11Analogous to the Iranian hostage crisis is the case of a UN international employee, Alicja Wesolowska, a secretary of Polish nationality arrested last August at Warsaw en route to a UN assignment. Deprived of her elementary rights, as well as those due her as an international civil servant, Wesolowska was held in solitary confinement until her trial in March, when she was sentenced to seven year’s imprisonment for “espionage,” a charge for which there is no concrete evidence. Wesolowska’s captivity and trial have taken place in flagrant violation of international conventions to which the Polish government is a signatory. In her case, however, the UN administration has shown itself not only helpless but reluctant to respond with any public assertion of a principle vital to its own survival. And a staff appeal for initiation of procedures to take the case to the World Court has so far received no action.
Concern among UN staff over the Wesolowska matter has brought to light a number of other cases of UN employees who have been arbitrarily arrested while performing UN duties; and who, in some cases, are presumed to have died in prison. No visible effort has been made by the UN administration on their behalf. As a UN official explained to a concerned inquirer, “They are all junior employees.”
12 And no powerful government is exercised over their fate.
No significant reform of the UN can occur without a profound change in the quality of UN press coverage. Reporting on the UN is traditionally indulgent to the point of infantilism, and sometimes indistinguishable from the vast propaganda apparatus maintained at public expense by the UN itself. In the case of Iran in particular, there is apparently no attempt by the press to relate UN failures to their larger context, nor any evidence of independent research. Waldheim’s discomfiture at Tehran in January was connected, by the UN press, to nothing more substantial than his once having kissed Princess Ashraf’s hand.
13While the UN commission of inquiry was being formed, portentous UN bulletins were prominent in each day’s newspapers. On an evident assumption that Iranians cannot read, reassurances emanated from the UN to the press to the effect that the UN inquiry would be merely “cosmetic,” and “would enable Iran’s new government to tell its people that their complaints have received international sanction and thus permit the authorities to free the captives.”
14 The
New York Times relayed that “United Nations officials are making little pretense that they have suddenly been overcome with shock and remorse over the shah’s regime; rather, the Commission’s investigation is seen as a device to get the hostages released.”
15Waldheim was described—presumably according to a UN definition of intrepidity—as having “taken a great risk”; and a timeworn UN formula of strength through incompetence was exhumed in the claim, solemnly relayed, that “the United Nations’ very lack of precision, its fuzzy improvisation, are precisely the qualities needed to fit the complex politics and unsettled internal power struggles in Iran.”
16As realities obtruded, front-page assertions gave way to more obscurely placed references to “delicate negotiations.”
17 With the collapse of the commission’s effort, reporting dwindled to uncritical reflections on the confused and inscrutable factions competing for power in Iran; with still no attempt to explore the confusions of the distinctly scrutable UN.
It seems probable, at this time, that the hostages at Tehran eventually will be released. Iran has pressing reasons, internal and external, to settle the matter. The journalist who brings the true condition of the UN before the public will make history. He will also pave the way for revision of international organizations. Jimmy Carter and Kurt Waldheim [d. 2007] are facing their respective reelections and, in their urgent need for political capital, can be expected to exert their utmost efforts to resolve the impasse at Tehran. It is idle, however, to pretend that Waldheim—insofar as he retains a role—has a humanitarian stake in the fate of the hostages. Nothing in the past conduct of his office, particularly as it refers to Iran, suggests such a concern.