Chief making at UN is uglay

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): It was the late Alger Hiss, the senior U.S. State Department official whose tarring with the communist brush gave Richard Nixon his early reputation, who summed up the criteria for selecting the UN Secretary-General. In a January, 1946, private note to the U.S. Secretary of State he wrote that "the qualifications of the Secretary-General should be the primary consideration." But qualifications are what it has never been about. And with the American veto of Boutros Boutros Ghali, who is about as well-qualified as a Secretary-General can be, we are reminded again how basely political the appointment always has been.

Another State Department memo from around the same period put it this way: "He (yes, even in the days of Eleanor Roosevelt it was he) should be 45 to 55 and be fluent in both French and English...It was generally agreed that it would be undesirable if the candidate should come from the USSR or France."

This is how it was that the shallow, vain and unimaginative Norwegian, Trygve Lie, became the first Secretary-General in February, 1946. He turned into an American Congressional stooge, succumbing to Senator Joseph McCarthy's purge of many of the UN's best American officials, an act of vandalism the organization has never really recovered from.

Lie once described his job "as the most impossible job on earth." To which the distinguished Indian journalist, Aamir Ali, observed, "it would not be extravagant to describe it today as the most important job on earth."

There have been, perhaps, three or four occasions when it has been that--at the time of the Congo crisis in 1960, when Dag Hammarskjold's calls for UN intervention managed to forestall an American and Soviet attempt to preempt each other, the Cuban missile crisis when U Thant facilitated Khrushchev's climb down and in 1973 when the Egyptian army crossed the Suez canal and confronted the Israelis in Sinai. Nixon put U.S. forces on full nuclear alert and Brezhnev initiated massive Soviet troop movements. Secretary- General Kurt Waldheim had UN peacekeeping troops to divide the armies on the ground within 24 hours and the situation was diffused.

But apart from these highly unusual events most of the time the hands of the Secretary-General are kept firmly tied. The only Secretary-General who had the strength of personality to partially escape this straitjacket was Dag Hammarskjold, a seemingly shy, introverted, almost totally unknown, colorless Swede, appointed at the tender age of 47. He emerged at a very late stage in the search for a candidate; the suggestion of the French ambassador who had been impressed by his work in Paris on the Marshal Plan.

From obscurity to Secretary-General took only two weeks. But before very long he was a household name the world over and was seen in the corridors of the UN as a vital but independent spirit who was prepared when the occasion demanded to stand up to both the superpowers. It was he who created UN peacekeeping. When he died in 1961 in a plane crash as he was mediating the Congo crisis he became an instant martyr and these days he is considered as one of the handful of political greats of our century, more remembered than most of the heads of government of the time.

One unpremeditated accident of appointment was enough. None of the Security Council would countenance another such figure, with the ability to articulate the aims and principles of the UN to a world public and thus build up that dangerous asset--an independent, popular, constituency.

The UN is an inter-governmental organization and governments have no intention of giving up control of it. Ax Max Jacobson, Finland's one-time ambassador to the UN wrote "the Big Five, if left to make the decision in a secret conclave, are likely to reach down to the lowest common denominator, not repeating the mistake of picking another Hammarskjold. The only force that could persuade them to accept an outstanding person is the pressure exercised by media attention and informed public opinion."

Thomas Jefferson once observed that "No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place." But at the moment governments are not even making the shadow of an effort to fulfill this responsibility. Nor are they prepared to make the selection procedure open to view so that the influence of public opinion might be brought to bear. The Clinton Administration and Senator Bob Dole, having between them rubbished Boutros Boutros Ghali in a way a little too reminiscent of the style of Richard Nixon with Alger Hiss, appear almost careless of what follows. The UN has now reached the nadir of its 51 years of existence.