A Sense of Irrelevance

ALMOST unnoticed--except perhaps by the attending delegates--the 27th session of the U.N. General Assembly adjourned last week. After more than 500 meetings and 1,500 hours of debate, the delegates succeeded in passing 153 resolutions. Nine dealt with disarmament, seven with Palestinian refugees, four with decolonization and South African apartheid, and three with bans on nuclear testing--all issues on which the U.N. has made little progress in the past.

A majority of the small, poor countries, which now account for 97 of the General Assembly's 132 votes, harp on these themes--mainly because the U.N. is the only place in the world where they can make themselves heard, and also because these issues are the only ones on which the Third World nations tend to agree. This year the U.S. was the only member to vote against and finally abstain from the main disarmament resolution. The proposal was unexceptional, merely calling for a committee to study the possibility of holding a general disarmament conference, but the U.S. regarded it as pointless since it would simply lead to more talking.

Indeed, the U.S. is increasingly at odds with the General Assembly's majority. This year it voted for only a few resolutions, including one to reduce its own budget contribution from 31% to 25% of the total. By comparison, such African states as Zambia and Burundi voted with the majority 92% of the time, according to the World Association of World Federalists, while Nigeria and Yugoslavia scored 85% and the Soviet Union 60%. The U.S. withheld support from 15 out of 20 key resolutions. It refused to support a proposal that the Indian Ocean be declared off limits to foreign navies, and it came out against a resolution once more ordering Israel out of occupied Arab territories. It also refused to legitimatize armed struggles in southern Africa because, as U.S. Ambassador George Bush put it, support for guerrilla armies was "contrary to the U.N. charter."

In the end, the Assembly resolutions made little difference because the 97-nation majority--which together pays only 14% of the U.N.'s dues--lacks the clout to follow through. Its leaders are well aware that the current diplomatic moves toward detente have taken place outside the U.N. Brazil's Ambassador to the U.S., J.A. de Araujo Castro, spoke for many Third World leaders recently when he observed, "It is a fact that the U.N. is becoming irrelevant on matters of peace and security, and runs the risk of being converted into a sort of international institute of technology or into an ineffective chapter of the International Red Cross." He added: "The discussions on the major international questions have become the chasse gardee [private game preserve] of an ever dwindling circle of major powers, and we are moving toward a concept of new centers of power upon which to build a new structure of peace."

Some Western experts are concerned about the extent to which the U.N. has been downgraded. Former U.S. Ambassador Charles Yost wrote recently: "When the Assembly of 132 states adopts a resolution, that action represents, as nearly as any action can in a world of separate sovereign states, the predominant public opinion of the world. It may not have the force of law, but it often has the force of prophecy."

President Nixon obviously disagrees. But his strategy of benign neglect toward the U.N. is probably based less on big-power realities than annoyance over many of the General Assembly's actions. Against all economic and administrative sense, African members insisted this year on setting up the U.N.'s environmental-program headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, far from all related U.N. agencies. A U.S. proposal for a convention to curb the spread of skyjacking and other terrorism never came to a vote (TIME, Dec. 25). Torture and repression of political dissidents by regimes as varied as those of the Soviet Union, Brazil and Greece are considered out of bounds at the U.N. because they are "internal matters." The Assembly has condemned white racism in South Africa and Rhodesia, but has chosen to ignore General Idi Amin Dada's treatment of the Asians in Uganda.

About the only major decision delegated to the General Assembly in recent years was the seating of China--a fortuitous development for those who attend Assembly sessions as well as for the West. The game of vituperation between Soviet and Chinese delegates provides moments of rare entertainment in the dull proceedings. It has also reminded everyone that there are other conflicts than the ones between rich and poor, capitalist and Communist, nuclear and nonnuclear, white and nonwhite.

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