United Nations history revisited

United Nations history revisited

By Alex Buzo

The United Nations celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
The following article examines the figures important during the
inception period of that world body and what happened to them
afterwards.

JAKARTA (JP): When Alger Hiss stepped on to the stage of a
packed San Francisco Opera House on April 25, 1945, it was the
high point of his life. He was elected unopposed as the first
secretary-general of the infant United Nations. Five years later
Hiss was in jail.

Exactly 50 years ago delegates from 45 nations met to draw
up a Charter that would give the world a security system to
protect it from World War III. It was not a peaceful conference.

"We have quarantined here in San Francisco the 200 or so
people most likely to cause war," one commentator said. After
nine weeks, on June 27, 1945, the embattled Charter was finally
signed.

Hiss and his fellow organizers had expected this "United
Nations Conference on International Organization" to last two or
three weeks, but they reckoned without the formidable ability of
the Australian delegate Bert Evatt, who challenged the proposed
Charter on 38 points, 26 of which were incorporated.

Evatt was a flawed, combative character who had a chip on each
shoulder. With his rumpled hair, carefully skewed tie and
bookmaker's voice, Evatt soon became a sensation around San
Francisco as he dominated the smallest of subcommittee meetings
and the largest of the plenary sessions in the Opera House. He
was known simultaneously as the best mind and the biggest
headache of the conference.

The coalition he put together, an Asian, African and Latin
American bloc, was the forerunner of today's Non-Aligned Movement.
Emerging as the hero of the small and medium nations, Evatt looked
unstoppable until it was revealed that Australia would persist
with a European bias in its immigration policy. Evatt's big
challenge, to make the veto and Security Council powers more
widely shared, was lost 20-10 with 15 abstentions; the
Philippines voted with the American bloc.

Australia was also prominent in the Trusteeship and
Decolonization debates, but Evatt could only go so far as a Third
World hero; within 10 years president Sukarno of Indonesia had
taken on that role. While Evatt pondered the reasons for his
defeat in the May 1955 elections against the fiercely anti-
communist Robert G. Menzies, Sukarno was host to the Bandung
Conference that took a third of the world "out of alignment".

For the first half of the San Francisco Conference it had been
an asset to be a liberal. The Russian communists were "our heroic
allies" and everyone, even the syndicated columnists of America, was
talking about peace, reform and post-war planning. Then it was
revealed that the Red Army was staying put in Poland; the Cold War
was beginning.

World War II had begun with Poland being invaded and now it
was ending with Poland being invaded. "All this war has done is
push back the boundaries of totalitarianism a hundred miles, from
the Rhine to the Elbe," asserted Clare Boothe Luce, the
Republican congresswoman who went on to denounce the proposed UN
as "globaloney".

The last year of the war, from August 1944 to August 1945,
had achieved something else: the greatest loss of life ever in a
twelve-month period. Beginning with the Warsaw Uprising, the
world suffered through the horrors of Belsen, the Battle of the
Bulge, the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the fall of Berlin,
and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The threat of
another conflict, this time against the Soviet bloc, was
something the young UN had to deal with as it was drawing up its
charter.

China's Chiang-kai-Shek had said in 1944 that "The Japanese
(invaders) are a disease of the skin; the communists (guerrillas)
are a disease of the mind." Set up primarily to prevent
incursions across borders, the UN had to deal now with
subversion/conversion within borders. It was not until 1950 when
North Korea invaded South Korea that the UN swung into large-
scale action.

The communist scare blighted the careers of several of the "San
Francisco Forty-Fivers". Hiss was jailed in 1950 for perjury when he
denied under oath that he was a Russian spy. Evatt was "kicked
upstairs" to the Supreme Court in 1960 after failing three times
to become prime minister of Australia.

Many of the delegates were live-wire foreign secretaries who
wanted to be prime minister, but few flourished in the cold
climate after 1945. Anthony Eden finally succeeded Winston
Churchill as Britain's leader in mid-1955, but he was out of
office and indeed out of politics within 18 months. The year 1957
was not a big one for Russian delegate V.M.Molotov -- his
appointment as ambassador to Outer Mongolia did not please him.

Eden called the San Francisco parley "this over-covered
conference" because of the extraordinary press attention. In the
era of personality journalism the big names included Elsa
Maxwell, Orson Welles and Walter Winchell. Life Magazine defined
Bert Evatt as "the spear carrier who became a hero", while Brig.
Gen. Carlos P. Romulo, aged 45 but looking 18, was the "boy
soldier". Jessie Street from Australia caused some controversy
when she called for "universal social hygiene" -- always a
difficult quest in a busy seaport like San Francisco.

When the hubbub died down, the result was a Charter that
went much further and delved more realistically into world
problems than the poor old League of Nations, which was stillborn
in 1919. The UN committed itself to Four Freedoms -- Race, Sex,
Speech and Religion -- as well as peace, decolonization and full
and stable levels of employment.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, brought
the San Francisco Conference to a close when he said of the just-
completed Charter "The words upon its parchment map a course by
which a world in agony can be restored." Fifty years later you
could say that the course has been erratically but faithfully
followed.

Alex Buzo is writer-in-residence at the University of
Indonesia.

Window: Australia was also prominent in the Trusteeship and
Decolonization debates, but Evatt could only go so far as a Third
World hero; within 10 years president Sukarno of Indonesia had
taken on that role.