Gorbachev for new UN Secretary-General?

By Jonathan Power

OXFORD, England (JP): The news has now sunk in. Boutros Boutros-Ghali is on the way out, and no one is going to go into battle for him. Five countries have a UN veto but, let no one doubt it, the veto that counts is America's. It is all grossly unfair and the Clinton White House should hang its head in shame for the way it has treated him. Starting with Somalia, where the U.S. pinned the blame onto the UN for the killing of 18 American soldiers and the disaster that followed, and ending in ex-Yugoslavia where it simply lifted matters out of UN hands.

Yet in Somalia, it was the U.S. Quick Reaction Force, acting independently of the UN command under the direct orders of Special Operations Command in Florida, that led the attack on the Somali warlord that provoked the slaughter of American soldiers.

And in Yugoslavia it was two years of consistent undermining of all the compromises that the UN and the European negotiators had pulled out of the fire (which later the U.S. "borrowed" for the Dayton accords), together with an insistence on pushing the UN into being a fighting force when it was configured for peacekeeping that finally discredited the UN. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was never "a mandarin without a mandate, a meddler without a method," as has been charged. Nevertheless, the harsh truth is that the Secretary-General has lost his credibility in America. He is the last man who can persuade Congress to pay up America's US$1 billion debt and in the next world crisis (a nuclear bomb in a suitcase in Grand Central Station?) this clever diplomat would have become a liability, unable to win America's ear in a way that is imperative if the UN's most powerful country is going to be part of the team. The UN has long been everyone's kicking boy, but in a time of trouble the big powers do have a habit of running to it and doubtless they will again. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War its role was indispensable. In the 1954 crisis over the capture of 17 U.S. airmen by China, American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou Enlai. It took six months of negotiation, but the men were released. President Dwight Eisenhower has a whole chapter in his book on the incident, but the central role of the secretary-general is almost ignored. It is the same in Robert Kennedy's book on the Cuban missile crisis. There is only a passing mention of secretary-general U Thant's letter to Soviet boss, Nikita Khrushchev, written in the face of a strong protest by the Soviet ambassador to the UN. Yet it was U Thant's letter that elicited a crucial response from Khrushchev indicating that there was room for compromise. Very few Americans are aware of this history. Their politicians, apart from Adlai Stevenson, have never bothered to educate the public and the media with rare exceptions has preferred to snipe and snigger. If the UN is going to stand on the high ground it now needs a secretary-general who commands instant respect in America. Ideally it should be an African because it is still Africa's turn and Africa has at least three eminent candidates. There is Kofi Annan, the brilliant master of UN peacekeeping operations. There is the recently retired Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu who brings out the most decent reflexes of everybody. There is Olusegun Obasanjo, the ex-president of Nigeria who engineered Nigeria's return to democracy now languishing in jail, the prisoner of the military gang of thugs who have hijacked Nigerian democracy. It should also be a woman and two women--the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland and Mary Robinson, the president of Ireland--are often mentioned. It should be someone who knows the UN inside out and who is highly effective at getting things done--such as Canadian businessman Maurice Strong, the secretary-general of the great Rio Un Environmental conference. Yet none of these are household names in America. So what about Mikhail Gorbachev, the former President of the Soviet Union and the man who, far more than any other human being, brought about the end of the Cold War, dismantled the communist system at home and engineered the freedom of eastern Europe? As Olga Chayhovskaya, the celebrated Russian writer, has observed, "he inherited a moribund, slavish country and made it alive and free." Nothing that happened in Gorbachev's time was inevitable. No other member of the Soviet hierarchy would have or could have followed the course Gorbachev took. Ronald Reagan did not defeat dictatorial communism, Gorbachev did--this is the conclusion of a new book on Gorbachev written by an Oxford professor, Archie Brown and it is persuasive. As the late stalwart foreign minister of the Soviet Union, Andrey Gromyko, used to say: "Gorbachev has a nice smile but iron teeth." Iron teeth are what is needed--to win over the U.S. Congress, to cut out the flab in the UN itself and, above all, to command instant respect so things get done when they have to be done.