Moynihan's First Fight

"We have not gone out looking for fights. But we haven't run away from any." So last week said Daniel P. Moynihan, who found himself embroiled in his first major diplomatic brawl since becoming U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations three months ago. Publicly squared off against him initially were U.N. representatives of numerous African states, who were furious at what they regarded as his rude attack on Uganda's President Idi Amin Dada and, by implication, on other black African leaders as well.

No Accident. The Africans were angered by a weekend speech that Moynihan gave at the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco. There, he sharply denounced the bizarre anti-U.S. address that Amin had delivered to the General Assembly two days earlier, in which Big Daddy had also demanded "the extinction of Israel as a state" (TIME, Oct. 13). Ignoring diplomatic niceties, Moynihan acerbically noted that "it's no accident, I fear, that this 'racist murderer' --as one of our leading newspapers [the New York Times) called him this morning--is head of the Organization of African Unity." When focusing on the Third World, Moynihan charged: "Every day at the U.N., on every side, we are assailed because we are a democracy. In the U.N. today there are in the range of two dozen democracies left; totalitarian Communist regimes and assorted ancient and modern despotisms make up all the rest. Nothing so unites these nations as the conviction that their success ultimately depends on our failure. Most of the new states have ended up as enemies of freedom."

As soon as the General Assembly reconvened last week, black African and Arab spokesmen launched a blistering counterattack. Dahomey's Ambassador Tiamiou Adjibade--currently chairman of the U.N.'s African group--blasted Moynihan for "a deliberately provocative act vis-`a-vis President Amin and an unfriendly act toward the O.A.U. If Mr. Moynihan wishes to base his strategy in the U.N. on irreverence, flippancy and irresponsibility, let him know right now that the African group will not allow itself to be intimidated."

Far from being contrite, the U.S. slugged back. In Moynihan's defense, U.S. Delegate Clarence Mitchell, an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, compared Amin--who brutally expelled at least 50,000 Asians in 1972 for racial as well as political reasons and has had killed anywhere from 25,000 to 250,000 Ugandans who opposed his dictatorial regime--to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, Moynihan shrugged off the furor at the U.N., insisting that Amin had started it when "he slandered and blasphemed the American people by saying that we let the country be run by Zionists." Then a White House spokesman declared that President Ford felt that Moynihan "said what needed to be said."

Brutal Buffoon. Moynihan had cleared the general contents of his San Francisco speech with the State Department but not its specific language. If he had done so, Washington's African experts might well have advised him not to implicate other leaders of the continent in his attack on Big Daddy. The O.A.U. heads of state, in fact, agreed only reluctantly to Amin's being their chairman this year. It is also no secret that many African leaders are privately displeased and embarrassed that a brutal buffoon like Amin can claim to speak for all Africa. In fact, when the O.A.U. summit convened in Kampala last July, only 19 of the 46 heads of state attended.

By week's end Moynihan's aggressive diplomacy seemed to be having some impact. A number of moderate Africans were dissociating themselves from Amin's extreme views. Colonel Joseph N. Garba, Foreign Minister of Nigeria--black Africa's most populous state--criticized Moynihan only for "overreacting a bit in the way he went about" attacking Amin. An editorial in the Nairobi Daily Nation roasted the African U.N. delegates for defending Amin, pointing out that "if anyone has been flippant and irresponsible, it is the Ugandan leader." If, as Garba predicts, the furor "blows over," then Moynihan may have been right to speak out so bluntly. He will have made his point that those developing countries that seek U.S. understanding of their desperate economic plight must, as he puts it, "calculate the costs and benefits" of indulging in outrageous attacks on the U.S. and its people.

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