CONTROVERSY CRASHES THE PARTY

By MICHAEL S. SERRILL REPROTED BY BONNIE ANGELO/NEW YORK

Officials from all over the world gathered in San Francisco last week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter, the first of many occasions on which the U.N. will honor itself in the coming months. Yet even as the anniversary festivities began, two incidents roiled up to illustrate how difficult the U.N. finds it to live up to its own principles. Foreseeably, both controversies were related to human rights, the issue that has often forced the U.N. to compromise the idealism of its origins.

The first involved Freedom House, the New York City-based human-rights organization. In its most recent annual report, issued last month, it listed Cuba as one of the world's worst violators of human rights. That incensed Juan Antonio Fernandez Palacios, second secretary to the Cuban mission and delegate to a special U.N. committee on "nongovernmental organizations" (ngos). Cuba was determined to pay back the assault. When Freedom House applied to the committee for accreditation to take part in discussions at the U.N., Fernandez pounced.

Fernandez tried to turn the committee against Freedom House by questioning whether it was an international organization, according to sources at the U.N. When that didn't work, he made sure that delegates from other countries criticized by Freedom House got copies of its report with their own negative ratings heavily underlined. When the matter came to a vote last week, the tally was 9-9, which under committee rules means the application from Freedom House was denied. It was the only group among 94 applicants to be rejected.

Freedom House is one of the oldest human-rights organizations in the U.S., and the vote dismayed American officials. "We strongly believe that Freedom House should be accredited," argued James Rubin, spokesman for the U.S.'s U.N. mission. The U.S. will continue the fight to reverse the ruling before the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council, which meets late this month in Geneva to ratify the ngo committee's recommendations. "Freedom House clearly ranks among the most reputable and effective human-rights ngos in the world today," says Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck.

In its annual report, Freedom in the World, Freedom House ranks each of the world's nations as "free," "partly free" or "not free." All seven members of the ngo committee that the report listed as "not free" -- Cuba, China, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Sudan, Swaziland and Tunisia -- voted against the organization. Their action highlighted a tendency among a coterie of nations often accused of political abuses, including Cuba, China, Iran and Indonesia, to continually fight U.N. efforts on behalf of human rights.

India and the Philippines were evidently annoyed at being categorized as "partly free," and so came down against Freedom House as well. "We voted the way we did because we wanted to show our displeasure at the lack of objectivity of Freedom House," said Alejandro del Rosario, spokesman for the Philippines' U.N. delegation. "How can they say we are 'partly free'?" He said his country had been a full-fledged multiparty democracy since the 1986 election of Corazon Aquino as President. To justify the rating, the Freedom House report cites killings, torture and kidnappings in rural parts of the Philippines by the paramilitary forces deployed to control communist insurgents.

In a more hopeful sign, two new democracies that Freedom House ranked as "partly free" -- Russia and Paraguay -- both voted to accredit the group, with their delegates arguing that to be a democracy means tolerating differences of opinion.

Less serious, but no less rancorous or symbolic, was the allegation of censorship in the publication of the U.N.'s own 50th-anniversary commemorative book, A Vision of Hope. The editor, Jonathan Power, a British journalist, protested that the U.N. staff made extensive cuts in the manuscript that 15 writers had turned in. Power says more than 70 references were deleted and most focused on nations cited for abusing human rights or failing to sign the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Gillian Sorensen, U.N. Under Secretary-General, responded that A Vision of Hope was intended to be a commemorative volume and not a history of the U.N. As the 50th-anniversary celebrations roll on, the distinction Sorensen draws between history and self-congratulation is probably worth bearing in mind.

--Reported by Bonnie Angelo/New York