Stay Your Hand

For the first time since Khrushchev's shoe-banging session, the U.N.'s 99 members gathered in Manhattan for another meeting of the General Assembly. They did so in a somber and disheartened mood that posed the question whether the U.N. can long survive as an effective body.

Since they met last, the Congo had come unstuck, and the U.N. had shown its helplessness there. Nikita Khrushchev was not coming this time (he sent Gromyko instead), but the Soviet Union's vituperative attacks on Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, and its near refusal to recognize his existence, demoralized everyone. Said one staffer: "Everybody here from Executive Assistant Andrew Cordier on down wants to resign. The Congo has done us in."

Tipping Scales. Even without the Congo, the U.N. was in a troubled time. The 16 new African members, besides tipping the weight of the Assembly toward the neutralists, wanted a bigger role in the Security Council, the committees, and the Secretariat as well. "And they don't even have enough trained people to run their own countries," griped one Secretariat oldtimer. This week Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah arrives in Manhattan to advance his pet scheme that an "all-Africa command" run the U.N. show in the Congo.

It was hard for seasoned diplomats to take the prideful new delegates as seriously as they took themselves, and this made for friction. "The more to the left, the more pompous in manner," complained one Western statesman. "They come with batons, aides and trainbearers. Why, one fellow won't even carry his own speeches."

Some of the European powers, though ready to continue the U.N. game, now talk about some new Atlantic alliance that could serve as a counterweight. Charles de Gaulle dismisses the U.N. as "ce machin" (that thingumabob). France has stubbornly refused to contribute any support to the Congo operation. Britain has never felt the same about the U.N. since Suez. Last week Paul-Henri Spaak, who was the first president of the U.N. Assembly in 1946, declared himself "disillusioned" by the way the U.N. was trending-as well he might, being Belgian. "The Assembly now wants to use force to solve . . . problems of a domestic nature," Spaak complained, and with "a passionate group" dominating its forum, "the General Assembly has become a temple of hypocrisy."

Adlai's Try. In such a disillusioned moment, U.S. Delegate Adlai Stevenson made a forceful speech in Manhattan. To African states, whose jockeying for immediate advantage has helped to undermine Hammarskjold's authority, he suggested that the U.N. "is of first interest above all to the weaker states, since without it they have no ultimate protection."

Stevenson called the U.N. "mankind's sole common instrument of politics," and his warning to the Russians was even blunter. "Africa is the Balkans of today," said Stevenson. "Any outside power seeking to manipulate its griefs and searchings and first fumbling efforts to stand alone risks bringing down on Africa and on the world the dread possibility of nuclear destruction." Stevenson then reminded the Russians of a law of history "more profound, more inescapable than the laws dreamed up by Marx and Lenin: war follows when new empires thrust into collapsing ruins of the old. So stay your ambitions. Think twice about your interventions. Do not sabotage the only institution which offers an alternative to imperialism."

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