We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  During the shah’s ascendancy, Waldheim administered an annual award of $50,000, known as the Pahlavi Prize, paid for by guess-who and conferred for environmental services.4 The first recipient was Waldheim’s own colleague, Maurice Strong, who was leaving the UN Environment Program after a short and turbulent career.5

  When Kurt Waldheim set foot in Iran on New Year’s Day, his first utterance was characteristically negative: “You cannot expect from such a first visit to solve immediately all problems. That is not being realistic.”6 Much more unrealistic was his supposition that the world observed the capers of UN officials with any residual optimism. Last October [1979], the Guardian of London discussed Waldheim’s role (nonexistent) in ending the Cambodia tragedy: “As so often when anything important is taking place in the world, the UN itself is silent.

  It is aided, abetted and guided in that silence by the inactivity of the Secretary-General himself…. Why does not Kurt Waldheim make a strenuous effort to overcome the deadly punctilio in which his office has taken refuge?”7

  In fact, the deadly punctilio is organic. The method for selecting Secretariat leaders is the only UN official process that can be described as finely honed. United Nations senior officers are systematically chosen for their very lack of moral courage and independent mind. The office of secretary-general is the pinnacle on which this negative capability culminates. In Waldheim, the position has found its consummate expression.

  Kurt Waldheim was born in Austria in 1918. He came to manhood, as it were, with the Anschluss, dutifully following the normal path by taking part in the Nazi youth movement and serving in Hitler’s army in various campaigns including the Eastern Front. To do otherwise would have been to exhibit a rare heroism—and, incidentally, to disqualify himself, had he survived, for the future position of UN secretary-general. Unflawed by any such aberration, Waldheim moved on through the Austrian diplomatic service and foreign ministry into the political life of his country, apparently intent on gaining high office. In 1971, shortly before his installation as UN secretary-general, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Austrian presidency. His UN appointment was sought, and possibly attained, through intensive lobbying.

  When Waldheim’s predecessor, the Burmese U Thant, retired as secretary-general, it was—as was remarked of Asquith’s fall from power—as if a pin had dropped. Waldheim inherited from Thant a position steeped in self-righteous timidity and administrative incapacity. The first UN secretary-general, Trygve Lie—whose background as a labor lawyer and member of Norway’s wartime government-in-exile might have promised better—had demolished any germ of a true international civil service by conspiring to violate the charter before its ink was dry. In the UN’s infancy, Lie contracted a secret agreement with the US government whereby Washington was given control over UN administrative procedures. The United States used this control to dominate the secretariat for twenty years, with incalculable adverse effect on UN potential, and in the end with particularly negative results for the United States.

  The most powerful member of the UN Secretariat in the organization’s formative years was not Trygve Lie but the administrative chief, Byron Price, an American of destructive tendencies who was in effect Washington’s chief covert agent at UN headquarters. During the McCarthy years, the Secretariat administration expelled, repelled, persecuted, intimidated, or alienated virtually every free-thinking employee in its senior and intermediate grades. This left a dross from which the present administrative edifice was formed. The danger to be avoided, in the view of member governments, was the possibility that a truly international civil service might be created, in accordance with the provisions of the UN Charter, to represent the moral principles that governments were likely to ignore. The organization was convulsed over this issue for six years. Lie’s legal officer, an American, committed suicide; and Lie himself, along with Byron Price, eventually resigned—but not before they had installed a branch of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation at UN headquarters, on international territory, for the purpose of “screening” the staff. The FBI office was retained by Dag Hammarskjöld until it had completed its “task.” No senior UN official was heard to object.

  Despite its systematic exclusion of persons of character from the Secretariat, and its rejection of candidates with even a mild show of unorthodoxy in their backgrounds, the UN administration has knowingly recruited, and retained in prolonged employment at senior grades, agents of the KGB and CIA—and, presumably, of every other national secret police on earth. That is entirely consistent with a UN precept that the only unforgivable offense a senior official can commit is to lose the endorsement of the relevant member government—not necessarily his own. When the double agent Shevchenko defected to the United States last year from his high UN post, it was announced that even though he had violated every contractual obligation, his UN pension would be paid.8 The former head of the UN mission in Cyprus, Prince Alfred zur Lippe-Weissenfeld, who resigned last September after repeated complaints from the government about his massive thefts of Cypriot antiquities, also will receive his UN annuity.9

  Waldheim’s own past presented no obstacle to his UN appointment. When the United Nations was founded, former members of fascist organizations in the belligerent states were declared ineligible for UN service. But this prohibition was rescinded quietly in 1952, at the very time when rigorous provisions were introduced against infusions of nonconformity. To have embraced a status quo, fascist or otherwise, apparently connoted the desired team mentality. What the United Nations abhorred was individual distinction. This view follows the precedent set in the 1930s by the League of Nations, whose officials declined to recognize the plight of German and Austrian Jews.

  The field of human rights is where the United Nations Secretariat had, and cast away, its supreme opportunity. In the intensifying violence of the last three decades, UN bodies of human rights and the leaders of the UN Secretariat have remained virtually silent: about American ravages in Asia, and about Pol Pot; about genocide in Biafra and Indonesia, starvation in Ethiopia, torture in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Uganda; about punitive mutilation in Saudi Arabia, and about the vast prison network of the Soviet Union.

  Into the vacuum created by UN inaction on human rights has come an active humanitarianism by individuals and private agencies that has gradually formed itself into a moral force—a force of the kind that a different United Nations might have inspired and led. This is the most hopeful development of the past decade. Organizations like Amnesty International operate with voluntary contributions: they offer their workers no exorbitant salaries or inane revels, and no delusions of self-importance. Nevertheless, they mobilize inestimable resources of human fellowship and proper indignation, and have assumed the task that the United Nations, with its colossal funds and massive bureaucracy, would not attempt. Only since the human rights movement burgeoned into a force not to be ignored has the United Nations made any effort to overcome its own paralysis in this area. Even so, Amnesty International has received no action on any of the thousands of documented cases it has submitted to the United Nations over many years.

  In his Nobel address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denounced the United Nations as a place where individuals have no voice or right of appeal:

  It is not a United Nations organization but a United Governments organization…which has cravenly set itself against investigating private grievances—the groans, cries, and entreaties of single, simple individuals…and abandoned ordinary persons to the mercy of regimes not of their choosing.10

  Solzhenitsyn cannot address the United Nations. Terrorists bearing arms can address UN assemblies, but not the moral heroes and martyrs of our violent age. The only notable recognition of his existence that Solzhenitsyn has received from the United Nations was a clandestine attempt by Waldheim and his associates, at the Soviets’ behest, to suppress his works in commercial bookshops on UN territory. Meanwhile in Moscow, in September 1977, Waldheim presented Leonid
Brezhnev with the UN peace medal, “in recognition of his considerable and fruitful activities in favor of universal peace and people’s security.”11

  Each December a handful of Soviet citizens demonstrate to commemorate the promulgation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are inevitably and invariably arrested by the Soviet police within moments of their appearance.12 No UN medals have ever been conferred on them, nor has a UN official ever publicly raised a voice on their behalf.

  The UN Secretariat is a disordered and hypertrophic institution whose continuance, as a UN official recently remarked, “defies the laws of logic and gravity.”13 This is reflected in the quality of all UN services, most tragically in the conception and execution of relief programs and technological aid. A systematic public inquiry into the competence of UN management and its cost effectiveness is overdue. It would be interesting to compare the true proportion of the budget spent on administrative costs in UN projects to that in private relief agencies. The US Senate Committee on Government Operations [since 2004 the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs] found in 1977 that UN salaries and material benefits ran 50 percent to 650 percent higher than the corresponding rewards to US civil servants.14

  Any effort to shed light on this pleonexia is characterized by the United Nations as a blow to world peace. Generally it arouses the only show of moral outrage at which UN circles excel. In the past year, realistic reporting on the United Nations by Morton Mintz of the Washington Post and a series in the same paper by Ronald Kessler about UN finances brought hysterical denunciation from both the United Nations and the US State Department. Charles Maynes, assistant secretary of state for international organizations, confirmed that Kessler’s statistics were accurate, but told the Post that “an article on the overall financial situation of the UN system would be used unfairly by political critics of the United Nations.” Maynes said that a story on the subject “will do tremendous damage to the United Nations…. The damage will be incredible. It will be devastating.”15 And so on.

  United Nations officials were not called upon to testify at the cursory congressional inquiry that followed the Post story because, as a congressional aide explained, “the United Nations prohibits its employees from testifying before a member country’s legislative committees.”16 As it happens, dozens of American UN employees did appear many years ago before the McCarran Internal Security Subcommittee, which made political sport of them and ruined their careers. Not only did the UN administration make no objection to this procedure, but it made clear that any employee who refused the summons would be dismissed.17

  It is hard to see how significant reform of the present UN system could ever be effected. In any case, a juster system, based on merit as decreed by the UN Charter, could not be introduced without scuttling the corrupt political basis of the present bureaucracy. It is among the intermediate and junior staff of the United Nations that decency has lingered, like a trace of archaic culture in a totalitarian state. The extirpations of early years silenced resistance for a generation; and the staff in general remains an extremely conditioned and intimidated group. Nevertheless, with the entry of younger people into the lower and middle grades, where appointments are not yet exclusively dictated by governments, some courage has filtered back.

  The labor mediator Theodor Kheel recently has undertaken, for a nominal fee, to represent the UN staff in its struggle with the administration. Kheel says that he has never encountered anything approaching the UN administration’s authoritarian attitude in forty years of labor mediation, and compares the UN leadership to “the court of Henry VIII.” Kheel says, “Waldheim would be a better international mediator if he’d eschew the role of ayatollah toward his own staff.”18

  When Pliable, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, turned back at the Slough of Despond and found his way home, he was at first “held greatly in derision among all sorts of people.”19 But soon he recovered confidence. In Waldheim’s case, too, with his recent excursion to Iran, the hollowness of his office has been only briefly exposed. But the question of Waldheim’s reelection is imminent, and the Iranian debacle—which has yet to run its course—may put an end to his UN career. This could provide an opportunity for the public, for the first time, to observe and criticize the appointment of his successor.

  Throughout the modern world, fear has created a heightened consciousness of human rights. The rise of active human rights agencies outside the United Nations suggests the form that a future world body might take. Whether public apprehension can be engaged toward the creation of rational international instruments depends, to a large extent, on serious treatment of this theme in the world’s press, where it has as yet been little explored. Having almost no realistic information on the United Nations, the public cannot frame hard questions, and takes the organization at the UN’s own trivial valuation, as an innocuous captive of incompatible national demands.

  UNHELPFUL

  Waldheim’s Latest Debacle

  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.1

  Over 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.”4

  Despite 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.”5

  In 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.6

  Acting 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 confere
nce 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.7

  The 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.