UN summit and censorship issue

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): This week most of the world's leaders meet in New York to celebrate the UN's 50th anniversary. Everyone, in the end, even if they don't pay their dues, even as they criticize it, wants it to stay in place.

It remains the best all-in-one forum for settling disputes, highlighting oppression, quenching financial crises, aiding the poor and keeping the airlines and the post moving--and it's all done on a budget of less than a major western city. If we didn't have it we would want to create it.

But would we want to recreate it with its most serious flaw--a culture of dishonesty, that is stuffed with time-servers and apparatchiks, whose reflexes are too often to fudge and nudge, that long ago has forsaken its commitment to Article 100 of the Charter: "In performance of their duties, the Secretary-General and the staff should not seek or receive instructions from any government"? No!

Censorship has become part of its work-a-day ethos. Hide, play down, shunt aside, obfuscate what is controversial, embarrassing, particularly if it's about individual human rights or upsets a heavyweight veto member of the Security Council.

Is it the Chinese who are calling too many shots? It certainly is one possible conclusion if one sifts through the fall-out from the production of an anniversary book on the UN, Visions of Hope, that I edited. This is a UN-commissioned, but supposedly independent, study of the workings of the organization, published by a commercial London publisher without a penny of UN money, in fact funded like the Los Angeles Olympic Games by corporate sponsors.

The book was to be published in time for the celebrations in June in San Francisco to mark the signing of the Charter. It never appeared, instead it was the subject of a bitter and extensively reported row between the UN and the book's contributors over censorship of important passages.

After all the contributors decided to take their names off their chapters, the book will be published today on Oct. 24, the day of this week's summit. But "published" is perhaps the wrong word. While 200,000 copies will go free to schools all over the world, in New York itself the UN are trying to keep it under wraps. Two hundred copies will be allowed in the UN book shop, but the UN 50th Committee, the commissioning organization, will not distribute it to delegations or to the UN press corps. The intention is clear. This controversial book that grabbed media attention away from the San Francisco celebration is not going to be allowed to bother the big birthday bash.

Interestingly, the apparatchik that is doing the hatchet job (for the Chinese?) is the Secretary-General's Special Advisor for Public Policy, a full-blooded American, Gillian Sorensen, wife of Ted Sorensen, President John Kennedy's most trusted advisor.

One of the book's contributors is Richard Reoch, formerly head of information at Amnesty International, who told the New York Times when the row first broke that "we know what editing is, and we know what censorship is," and accused Mrs. Sorensen of air- brushing history. He's now produced, along with some of the other contributors, a telling pamphlet, wryly entitled The Revision of Hope.

The cuts to the book that they highlight have all the hallmarks of a Chinese executioner:

* no mention that the Dalai Lama was denied permission to speak at the UN Conference on Human Rights two years ago. Indeed, no quotation from the Dalai Lama at all.

* no mention that Chinese defense spending is rising unnaturally fast.

* no mention of Chinese imperial ambitions over the oil-rich Spratly Islands.

But as part of their fudge and nudge, the UN apparatchiks have tried to cover their trail by balancing these cuts that they thought would offend the Chinese with cuts of paragraphs that they presumed would upset other veto-wielding members plus passages that don't make the UN's own human rights record look good:

* deletions of photo captions on French nuclear tests and Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia, deletions of criticism of western influence on the Security Council, deletions of criticism of the U.S. Congress for its growing hostility to the UN, deletion of the record of the vote on the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and even deletion of the British role in the great Irish famine of the 1840s.

No, it's probably not Chinese influence. It's worse than that. This is just the way members of the UN bureaucracy too often work. They inhabit a culture of paranoia, fearful always that a powerful member country (or in the Cold War days, the Group of 77) is looking over their shoulder. It is this that makes them lose their judgment about right and wrong. And this is why the wise men who wrote the Charter inserted Article 100, to protect them against being morally neutered. But it is up to the Secretary-General--and this is the present incumbent's greatest weakness--to enforce it.

The same institution that framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is now itself suppressing information about human rights abuses and become a censor in its own right. But don't "we the people," to quote the opening words of the Charter, have a word? We do need the UN, but what we don't need is intellectual cleansing of historical events that some of its more powerful members find difficult to publicly acknowledge.