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.