Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  In the U.S., meanwhile, new international bodies were created to deal with humanitarian aid and food shortages in the countries ruined by war. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was formed in 1943, an organization Churchill, at first, found hard to take seriously. Once again in his bathroom, he was heard to sing “UNRRA!, UNRRA!, UNRRA!” as though it were a music hall turn. After the war, UNRRA was inevitably accused by Republicans in the United States of being soft on communism. There was some reason for this: since western European governments were deemed to be able to take care of their own problems, much of the relief went to eastern European countries and Soviet republics, where the spoils tended to go to political favorites. UNRRA was often a shambolic enterprise, especially in the early stages, and yet without it many more people would have perished in dreadful conditions.

  By the time Stalin’s Red Army was driving back the exhausted Germans across the icy plains of the Ukraine and the Western Allies had secured their beachheads at Normandy, the Big Powers had a rough idea what the future UN organization would look like. It would have a General Assembly, and a Security Council controlled by the Big Powers themselves. Economic cooperation to defeat Germany—Lend-Lease, and so on—provided the basis for an international monetary system, with international rules to contain the excesses of economic nationalism and noxious forms of speculation. And there would be an International Court of Justice.

  The monetary system was set up in 1944 at a resort hotel in New Hampshire named Bretton Woods. The meeting, formally titled the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was held at Bretton Woods for two reasons: the New Hampshire senator on the congressional banking and currency committee was a Republican opponent of currency regulation who needed to be brought around, and the hotel accepted Jewish guests, which was not always the case in rural establishments of this sort. It would hardly have done for Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, among others, to be turned away at the door.

  In November 1944, Roosevelt won his fourth term as president of the United States. That he was by then fully committed to a postwar UN was obvious from his campaign statements. The world needed a global New Deal, in his view, and the UN needed to be empowered to secure global peace. As he said at the time: “To my simple mind it is clear that, if the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representatives must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in Congress, with authority to act.”15 Even though the voices that associated Roosevelt and his ideals with “communism” had not been stilled, most American citizens now appeared to agree with him.

  Just before Roosevelt’s fourth election, there had been one more conference on the UN, held discreetly at Dumbarton Oaks, a plush estate in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, the so-called Big Three, had decided Allied policies during the war. This time, a Big Fourth, China, was invited to take part as well. These Big Four, it was hoped, would jointly police the postwar world, even though there was limited confidence that China would be able to play its part. Neither Churchill nor Stalin had much respect for Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, but the Americans were very keen to give the Generalissimo face. (Later, in San Francisco, the Big Four became the Big Five, with France in urgent need of face-saving as well.)

  There were still disagreements at Dumbarton Oaks, however, about the exact shape of the United Nations. Which countries would be eligible for membership? Should the UN mission confine itself to security (the Soviet position) or also include economic and social affairs, which is what the U.S. wanted (and got)? Should there be an international air force? Who would supply UN troops? Should every member have the right to veto UN actions, as was the case in the League of Nations, or just the Big Powers? Exactly what should be subject to veto—just the actions, or investigations and topics for discussion too? Compromises were struck, and hard questions (the veto) left unresolved. Membership, in principle, would be open to all “peace-loving states,” a phrase that appealed to the sentimental side of the Americans, but meant something more specific to Stalin, who habitually denounced critics of the Soviet Union as enemies of peace. Finland, for example, which had defied the Soviet Red Army in 1940, was an enemy of peace.

  And so the stage was set for San Francisco, where, on April 27, 1945, the peace-loving world would unite and the UN be transformed from a wartime alliance to a “democratic organization of the world,” as Roosevelt liked to say.16

  Sadly, the president, already gravely ill and fatally exhausted by the conference at Yalta, where, despite the grandeur of the tsar’s old summer palace, conditions were not comfortable (bedbugs were a particular torment), died on April 12. But the new president, Harry S. Truman, actually cranked up expectations for a democratic world order even higher than his predecessor had done. Upon receiving an honorary degree in June from the University of Kansas City, not long before putting his signature to the UN Charter, Truman declared in a burst of Yankee optimism: “It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for us to get along in the republic of the United States.”17

  • • •

  THE FLAGS OF FIFTY NATIONS snapped in the Pacific breeze, as five thousand delegates arrived, and hundreds of thousands of spectators flooded the streets for the opening ceremony at the San Francisco Opera House. All the world—except Germans, Japanese, and their allies, of course—was there. Or actually, not all the world; there were exceptions. And perhaps not everyone that was there, should have been. Argentina, whose military junta, until the very end of the war, had been distinctly sympathetic to the fascist camp, was invited because of some gamesmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The latter wanted the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus to be full members, so the U.S., needing Latin American support, insisted on the inclusion of Argentina.

  Poland, on the other hand, the country where World War II began, was not invited, because there was no agreement over a legitimate government. The Soviet Union had sponsored a provisional Polish government, known as the Lublin Committee, while the Polish government-in-exile continued to make its claims from London. As long as this was so, there was no question of inviting the Lublin Committee to San Francisco, as the Soviets wanted. Stalin had assured Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta that Poland would have free elections, and sixteen leaders of the Polish wartime underground had even been invited for a friendly chat with the Russians. That nothing more was heard from these Polish leaders since was ominous. In the words of E. B. White in the New Yorker, “Over the city the Polish question hovered like a foul bird.”18

  Still, there was enough optimism to get on with. Arab delegates had a particularly exotic appeal for the local gawpers. According to Yank magazine, “American celebrity hounds jostled one another to look at the Aye-rabs from close up and said, to a man, ‘Sheeks, huh? How about that?’”

  And the Arabs responded with similar bafflement. A Mr. Farid Zeineddine of Syria described his impressions to Yank: “The Americans seem to me like a nation of people in spectacles, all chewing gum. Maybe they have to wear spectacles because the buildings are so high and they strain their eyes to see up and down them.”19

  Others surveyed the scene with a more acid eye. Michael Foot, the future leader of the British Labour Party, was there as a columnist for the Daily Herald. A good European socialist, he was worried about the “dangers of America’s present status.” The U.S. was simply too rich, too unscathed by war, too powerful. “America’s economic prospects,” he observed, “seem to dwarf the conference itself.” What was more, newsreels shown at local cinemas of the Nazi concentration camps did not, as he put it, “incite to mafficking” (rejoicing, as British crowds did during the Boer War when the siege of Mafeking was lifted).20

  Other films in the American cinemas that spring, no doubt aimed at lifting the flagging war spirit in the last months of the Pacific War,
were John Wayne’s Back to Bataan, and Objective, Burma! with Errol Flynn. But there was more cheerful entertainment on hand as well, including MGM’s Son of Lassie, Dorothy Lamour in Medal for Benny, and Here Come the Co-Eds with Abbott and Costello.

  Accommodations, for which delegates were supposed to pay themselves, were certainly more plush than at Yalta. Gladwyn Jebb, who had attended most wartime conferences, including Yalta, as Churchill’s diplomatic adviser, described the San Francisco experience as “an appalling outbreak of hospitality.”21 The Big Four Powers (soon to be Five), presided over by U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., met in the circular library of a penthouse apartment at the top of the Fairmont Hotel—“with a blue ceiling and two love seats upholstered in green,” in the words of Time magazine.22 The lesser delegations worked on the floors below.

  Agreement on general principles came swiftly between the Big Powers. But there were tensions between them and the rest, between the aim of Big Power dominance and a democratic world organization. The smaller countries, represented by the grandiloquent Australian foreign minister, Dr. Herbert Evatt, resented the veto rights of the Big Powers in the Security Council, but they had to give way. The Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, took the most extreme Big Power position. He continued to insist on the right to veto any subject the Soviet Union did not wish to be discussed in the UN. This attitude almost sank the conference, until a U.S. diplomatic mission was sent to Moscow, and Stalin instructed Molotov to back down.

  All appeared to be fine, among the Big Three at least, when Molotov organized a lavish banquet for his British and U.S. counterparts, the suave Anthony Eden, and Edward Stettinius, described by Brian Urquhart as “a man with theatrical good looks and unnaturally white teeth.”23 As usual at these Russian affairs, huge amounts of food and drink were consumed. Photographs were taken of the three men toasting one another, in which even the colorless Molotov, known in Soviet Party circles as “Steely Ass” for the long hours spent at his desk, managed to contrive an air of bonhomie. It was getting late. The gentlemen were beginning to feel distinctly woozy.

  Then something extraordinary happened. Still in an expansive mood of chummy goodwill, Molotov announced to his esteemed colleagues that he could finally divulge what had happened to the sixteen leaders from the Polish underground. They had been arrested for “diversionist activity” against the Soviet Red Army, a crime that carried the death penalty. Eden, first shocked, then furious, demanded a full explanation. Molotov, ruffled by Eden’s sharp tone, became sullen and defensive. The festive mood instantly evaporated. Once more, the conference was in danger.

  This storm, too, blew over, however. Wishful thinking kept reality at bay. American liberals were told by the Nation magazine that once “truly free elections” were held in Poland, “Russia’s moral position” would be “greatly strengthened” and “distrust reduced to a minimum.”24 The vague promise of free elections was the fig leaf, eagerly grasped at by the Western Allies at Yalta, which no one yet wished to throw away. Only the Soviets knew that the sixteen brave Poles who had risked everything by resisting the Germans in the most ghastly conditions had already been tortured by the Soviet secret police and tried as “Nazi collaborators.” They were sentenced on June 21, while the San Francisco conference was still going on. All but two were later murdered in Soviet prisons.

  Even as the sixteen Poles were being tortured in Moscow, the Big Powers discussed a declaration on human rights for inclusion in the preamble to the Charter (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came later, in 1948). This noble fruit of Enlightenment thinking, as well as Christian universalism, the idea that human rights should benefit not just one community, defined by faith or culture or political borders, but mankind, was seen by Stéphane Hessel and many others as the greatest contribution of the postwar order. Universal human rights were linked to the law, adopted in Nuremberg, on “crimes against humanity,” which in turn was linked to the concept of genocide, defined in 1944 by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.”

  Not that anyone suggested for a minute that human rights would or could be enforced. Quite to the contrary. In the words of a British foreign policy adviser at San Francisco, the historian C. K. Webster, “Our policy is to avoid ‘guarantee of human rights,’ though we might not object to a declaration.”25 And a declaration duly arrived, based on a draft written by General Jan Smuts, the South African statesman and hero of the Boer War, who had assisted at the birth of the League of Nations, as well as of the UN. These were the words decided upon in San Francisco by the Big Powers in June: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined . . . to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small . . .”

  Michael Foot, in his column for the Daily Herald, singled out the moral leadership of the Soviet Union for special praise. He pointed out that before the war the British government under Neville Chamberlain had suppressed the news of Nazi atrocities. But then, of course, “the victims were only Liberals, Socialists, Pacifists and Jews.” Nowadays, he observed with a touch of superciliousness, “these types will have the advantage of their rights being included in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Freedoms drawn up by General Smuts. This Charter will even apply to black people in South Africa. Or will it?” Foot’s doubts on this score were not unfounded, but he, too, was happy to overlook the foul stench of the Polish question. Indeed, he commended the Soviets for expressing “a far more logical and unequivocal view” on “the political rights of dependent peoples than any other nation.”

  There was one more crisis before the Conference reached its conclusion at the end of June. The action, this time, was in the Levant, where on May 29 French troops were fighting Syrians in the streets of Damascus, and dropping bombs, not just on the ancient capital, but on Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. The French had called for reinforcements after Syrian demands that they transfer special Syrian forces under French command to the Syrian national army.

  The next day, Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli, a deft diplomatic operator, wrote a letter to President Truman expressing the same sentiments as Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno, though with a much more successful outcome. Here were the French, he wrote in perfectly justified indignation, killing Syrians with weapons bought with money borrowed from the United States to fight the Germans. The United States had recognized Syria as an independent country in 1944. So: “Where now is the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms? What can we think of San Francisco?”26

  The Americans needed little encouragement to take the side of the Syrians. European imperialism was not popular in Washington, and French imperialism least of all. Unlike Indochina, which was rather more alien territory to the Americans in those days, Syria and Lebanon had long been regarded with the kind of benevolent paternalism bestowed on the Chinese as well, a mixture of missionary zeal and commercial interest: the American University in Beirut, Christian missions in Jerusalem, an Open Door economic policy. The popular phrase among U.S. policymakers at the time was “moral leadership.” No doubt, as appears to be true of John Foster Dulles, the moral sentiment was sincere, but so was the ambition to lead.

  Since the Allies had already promised to recognize postwar Syrian independence when British troops occupied the Levant in 1941, they could hardly ignore Quwatli’s plea now. So Churchill instructed his man on the spot, General Bernard Paget, to drive the French back into their barracks. This was not a difficult task, as the French were far too few in number to resist. The left-leaning Manchester Guardian reported the event with patriotic delight. Its reporter “marched into Damascus with the sailors . . . while crowds of surprised Damascenes clapped their hands . . . The people of Damascus hissed and booed the long line of lorries, tanks, and Bren-gun carriers taking French troops out of the city, e
scorted by British armored cars . . .”27

  General de Gaulle responded with fury to what he saw as a heinous Anglo-Saxon conspiracy: “We are not in a position to open hostilities against you at the present time. But you have insulted France and betrayed the West. This cannot be forgotten.”28

  On the surface, the Syrian crisis was the perfect test for the new world order that was being shaped in San Francisco. If ever there was a legitimate case for living up to the words of the Atlantic Charter and the ethos of the UN, this was it. The French, despite promises made in 1941, were trying to restore their colonial authority. The British were quite right to put them in their place, hence the proud tone of the Guardian’s report.

  It wasn’t, of course, quite as simple as that. As they had elsewhere in the Middle East, the British played a double game, making different promises to different people. With the end of the Ottoman Empire in sight in 1916, Britain and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement had carved up the Levant into spheres of interest: France would have the run of Syria and Lebanon while Britain took charge of Transjordan and Iraq. In 1941, a year after France had been defeated by Germany, British forces moved into Damascus, promising to support Syrian independence while recognizing France’s privileged position. These were obviously not compatible aims. In fact, what the British really wanted was to become the major players in the Levant themselves. So they were quite happy to see the Syrians provoke the French. Violent French retaliation was just the excuse needed to kick them out altogether. And this, in effect, is what was happening in the early summer of 1945.