At least the loathsome North Koreans didn’t make it. The number-two Pyongyang commie, Kim Yong Nam, and his fourteen wiseguy delegates stopped by—of all the unlikely crime-fighting forces—rude airline personnel. American Airlines wouldn’t let the North Koreans onto the Frankfurt–New York flight without pat-downs and luggage inspections. I can just hear the snippy people at the check-in counter: “I’m sorry, but your weapons-grade plutonium must fit in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you.” By the time Kim Yong Nam et al. got done throwing tantrums, they’d missed their flight. And happy fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War to you, too, assholes.
Fortunately I was walking to UN headquarters instead of flying and only had to contend with all the law enforcement agencies on earth and not American Airlines. Thus I was able to saunter into the General Assembly building simply by flashing my credentials. These consisted of one piece of laminated plastic containing blurry print and a picture, allegedly of me, which looked like it was clipped from the middle of a five-dollar bill.
I was just in time to see the fifty-fifth session of the UN brought to order by the newly elected president of the General Assembly, a former prime minister of Finland, Harri Holkeri, who seems like a perfectly nice man despite his Japanese suicide of a name and who can almost speak English. After some opening blandishments, President Holkeri presented the General Assembly with its first piece of serious business under his regime, a plan “to start the General Assembly meetings on time.” A fitting proposal, inasmuch as this particular General Assembly meeting was starting twenty minutes late with most of its delegates absent from their seats.
Next order of business was the admission of Tuvalu as a member of the United Nations. Two-of-what? You may well ask. Tuvalu is a former British colony consisting of nine coral atolls halfway between Hawaii and Australia with a land area one-tenth the size of Washington, D.C., and a population of 10,297. My college had fraternity houses larger than that. What’s next? Sigma Chi becomes a NATO power? Tuvalu has no crops, no industry, and no known mineral resources. It has no drinking water except what’s collected in rain barrels. The economy is based—seriously—on selling Tuvalu stamps to collectors.
The charter of the United Nations states in Article 2, paragraph 1, “The Organization is based on the principle of sovereign equality of all its Members.” And no doubt a very good principle this is. But Tuvalu? “If there are no objections…” said President Holkeri. And no one in the General Assembly did object or, as far as I could tell, notice.
Having exhausted my interest in the doings of the General Assembly, I wandered into Conference Room 1 in the UN’s unimaginatively named Conference Building. Here something called “Dialogue Among Civilizations” was being conducted. Conducted by whom and for what purpose I don’t know. Although I do know that “Dialogue Among Civilizations” was Iran’s idea and, considering the ideas Iran has had in the past, such as holding scores of Americans hostage, having an eight-year war with Iraq, and sponsoring worldwide terrorism, I figured it would be interesting. I was wrong.
I had missed the morning session where Iran’s president, Mohammad Khatami himself, gave a speech that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called thought-provoking and The New York Times called “vague.” And I would have missed the afternoon session if it hadn’t (notice to President Holkeri) started fifty minutes late. Somebody on the conference podium, I have no idea who, spent a long time proposing a “Question for Conversation,” the question being “How do we focus the conversation on dialogue?” Although I was under the impression that conversation is dialogue, otherwise social life would be like…like sitting in Conference Room 1 listening to the first speaker on the subject of dialogue, who was former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, age eighty, who couldn’t find the ON button for his microphone and ,when he did find it, said, “For almost sixty years we are dialoguing here.” No, no, Javier, twenty minutes by my watch, although I know it seems like sixty years. The former secretary general wanted countries to have “dialogue not only among but within themselves.” He said democracy was good for this, although I’ll bet the upcoming Bush/Gore debates will argue otherwise.
Then some jerk university professor spoke, asking “Internet companies to act on the basis of something besides self-interest.” A novel concept and I can hardly wait for the e-mail notices from AOL telling customers, “We considered improving our online services in order to attract more business and increase our corporate profits, but then we decided, ‘Screw that, we’re joining the Peace Corps.’”
The next speech was in French, and one of the UN’s famous corps of simultaneous translators went to work. She was good. Either that or she just made up stuff and pretended it was what the froggy bozo in Conference Room 1 said. Whatever, the gist was that Western civilization had made the mistake of thinking it was the center of the world just because it was, like, the world center of stuff. This was followed by a pronouncement that “It is the element of the barbarous that everyone must find in his own civilization,” which I took to be a suggestion that the delegates hit the lap-dancing bars later on. The bozo then began a declamation upon tolerance: how tolerance begins with sufferance and progresses to the idea that differences are good and progresses further to embrace the realization that “the contrary of a profound thought is another profound thought,” this being the definition of tolerance according to the French philosopher Pascal. At which point I ran out of tolerance.
Nick, I’ve provided you with a taste of UN political and intellectual discourse here, and I sincerely apologize. At least it’s better than actually being at the UN in person, the way I was. The place is a dump. The UN headquarters complex was completed in 1952 in the Hanna-Barbera Jetsons style of modern, which is now back in vogue—but with light, with color, with irony. At the UN it’s with linoleum. There are acres of gray linoleum that seem to have been given a light mopping, once a month, by the same cleaning lady for the past forty-eight years. The Secretariat Building smells of old food. The pole lamps take themselves very seriously.
The chief architect was Wallace K. Harrison, who also designed Rockefeller Center but apparently wasn’t feeling so well during the three or four hours it must have taken him to dash off the UN blueprints. Wallace had additional input from Oscar Niemeyer, creator of dreadful Brasilia, and Le Corbusier, who led a lifelong campaign to make the whole world as pretty and comfortable as O’Hare Airport.
Use of bilingual signage in English and French gives the corridors of the UN a sadly Canadian air. One widely posted warning reads, SMOKING DISCOURAGED/VEUILLEZ EVITER DE FUMER, and that says it all about the United Nations, its power and its might.
The dumb slab of the UN Secretariat and the skateboard park shape of the General Assembly are matched with what might be the worst collection of art on earth: A tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica full scale, in earth-tone needlepoint; two Fernand Léger murals that appear to be the graffiti tags of a street gang that never learned the alphabet and ran out of spray paint; a painstakingly detailed 660-pound sculpture depicting the construction of the Chengtu–Kunming railroad, gift of the People’s Republic of China (tucked away out of sight on the third floor of the Secretariat because it was carved from eight elephant tusks); a huge pistol with its barrel tied in a knot, symbolic of, I guess, the UN’s botched peacekeeping missions; an enormous bronze by Soviet artist Evgeny Vuchetich showing an heroic figure beating his sword into what looks like a beaten-on sword; a great big hunk of alloy, vaguely face-shaped, with a hole in its head (a memorial to UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld); and much more, including a thirty-ton pot-metal cast of a sleeping elephant, visible on the way to the UN children’s playground, that was partly paid for by donations from the Church of Scientology and sports a two-foot erection. Bushes have been planted in strategic places.
Everyone connected to the UN must have breathed a sigh of relief in 1987 when the secretary general “informed all the Perm
anent Representatives of Member States that there would be a moratorium on the acceptance of further gifts.”
The United Nations press corps didn’t look so good either. Being sent to cover the UN is, for a journalist, not a vote of confidence from the front office. The last—and possibly first—truly dramatic thing to happen at the UN was when Khrushchev pounded his desk with his shoe in 1960. And the main source of drama there was suspense about whether Nikita was too fat to get his shoe back on by himself. Would he have to ask for “foreign aid”? (Ha-ha. A little specimen of General Assembly jokes. Who says the UN has no sense of humor?) This was before most journalists were born but not, alas, before most journalists covering the UN were. Appearances tell the story—the pallor, the jowls, the ill-fitting suit, the self-serious demeanor, the pathetic interest in pointless UN minutiae. And that was just me. You should have seen the others.
Returning to my hotel after Tuesday’s UN festivities, I encountered one of the week’s few political demonstrations that refused to stay confined to the special political demonstration areas provided. Eighteen Iranian dissidents tried to block First Avenue. This was problematic because eighteen people aren’t enough to block First Avenue and also because UN security and New York traffic jams had blocked First Avenue already.
Police dutifully arrested all concerned, using plastic disposable handcuffs. The large bundled loops of polyethylene wrist restraints made the NYPD look like they were about to engage in some idiot craft activity, a postmodern macramé class perhaps, with results to be displayed in the UN Secretariat.
“Khatami,” shouted the protesters, “must go! Go! Go! Go!”
“Go Yankees!” shouted a drunk on the sidewalk.
The next morning the General Assembly came to order half an hour late (second notice to President Holkeri), Secretary General Kofi Annan presiding.
Kofi Annan, the man who emerged from Baghdad negotiations in 1998 saying he had “a good human rapport” with Saddam Hussein, was equally optimistic in his agenda for the Millennium Summit. Annan’s plan: to ensure that “all children complete a full course of primary education,” to “halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS,” and to reduce by 50 percent “the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day” (not including, presumably, 31,000 people in Bangladesh). This is to be done by 2015, plus a lot of other stuff such as removing “regulatory and pricing impediments to Internet access,” so that, I guess, everybody on the globe can get into the “Living on Less Than One Dollar a Day” chat room.
These are ambitious goals for the UN, considering the organization’s previous achievements.
The United Nations set off the 1948 Arab–Israeli war with an arbitrary partition of Palestine that told everybody in the Middle East where to go. Then the UN got blindsided by the Korean War and let a too-enthusiastic Douglas MacArthur be sucker-punched by the Red Chinese, who had meanwhile squashed Tibet while the UN wasn’t looking.
The United Nations hopped up and down and yelled “phooey” during the 1956 Suez crisis and sat with its collective thumb up its butt while Russia invaded Hungary the same year.
In 1960 the UN sent troops to shoot Africans because Katanga province wanted to secede from the former Belgian Congo, even though Chapter I of the UN Charter mandates “self-determination of peoples” and even though the former Belgian Congo was in a state of anarchy so that, in reality, Katanga was seceding from nothing. But later the UN would stay home, maxing and relaxing, while Nigeria slaughtered and starved the Biafrans because that was “an internal matter.”
The United Nations let its peacekeepers be used as doormats in the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and in many other places where UN peacekeepers were so careful about keeping peace that nobody was given any.
The United Nations just fumed and sputtered during the war in Vietnam and didn’t even do that when the Soviet Union crushed Czechoslovakia in 1968. The UN membership stared at the General Assembly hall ceiling and whistled “Dixie” while Tutsis committed genocide on Hutus in Burundi and gazed out the window and picked its nose while Hutus committed genocide on Tutsis in Rwanda.
The United Nations gave Idi Amin a pass while he expelled all the Asians from Uganda and ate a bunch of the rest of the people there. The United Nations couldn’t go out—had to wash its hair—during the Khmer Rouge horrors in Cambodia.
The UN let George Bush chop the wood and carry the water in the Persian Gulf, screwed the pooch in former Yugoslavia, and ran like a spanked Cub Scout out of Somalia. I could go on, and the UN doubtless will.
Nor was it an encouraging sign when Kofi Annan began his remarks to the Millennium Assembly by announcing that a mob of Indonesian militiamen had overrun a United Nations refugee office in West Timor, killing three of the UN staff. A minute of silence was observed, and—with no disrespect for the dead intended—maybe that minute should have been extended for a decade or two. Even former U.S. ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson, a noted internationalist and strong United Nations proponent, once complained to the State Department, “Do I have to stay here for more of that yak-yak? It doesn’t mean a thing.”
Speaking of yak-yak, the format for the Millennium Summit General Assembly meeting was this: Every single UN member nation would have five minutes to make a speech, delivered by its chief of state, head of government, or senior UN delegation member—a marathon of natter lasting from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. for three days.
President Clinton commenced the blathering with orotund Clintonisms: “The international community must take a side, not merely stand between the sides or on the sidelines.” With a side of fries.
Next was the president of Equatorial Guinea whose name is on the tip of my tongue. Let’s see, maybe it was Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Or maybe not. My World Almanac is three years out of date, and Equatorial Guinea may have experienced a number of coups and revolutions since then. Anyway, What’s-his-face said, “The growth of some nations is based on exploitation of others.” Although nobody I know has made a bundle by exploiting Equatorial Guinea. I checked with my stockbroker and I know I haven’t.
After that came the president of Guatemala, who said, “Cultural diversity is an asset.” Interesting words from a country that spent most of the eighties in a civil war, trying to kill off its culturally diverse Indians.
Then it was Mohammad Khatami’s turn, he of First Avenue blockage and Dialogue Among Civilizations fame. Khatami praised democracy (of which there is a very funny sort in Iran) and called for democracy (although whether the Iranian type or the regular kind he did not say) to be extended to the operations of the UN.
Nicaragua’s president protested the exclusion of Taiwan from the United Nations. (I suspect a certain amount of business investment and/ or foreign aid has arrived in Managua from Taipei recently.) He pointed out that there are twenty million people in Taiwan who are not represented at the UN, but he refrained, diplomatically, from mentioning the contrasting case of Tuvalu.
Vladimir Putin touted disarmament—something his country had already begun on a unilateral if unintended basis with the submarine Kursk.
If the foregoing speeches sound absurd, it’s important to remember that absurdity is integral to the United Nations. The allies in a war against Nazism founded the UN, which, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1975, passed a resolution declaring “Zionism is a form of racism” under the auspices of a secretary general, Kurt Waldheim, who was a Nazi.
A doddering Franklin Roosevelt thought that the naive United States, enervated Britain, corrupt and impotent Nationalist China, and Stalin’s gulag of a Soviet Union would be the world’s “Four Policemen.” And quite a plot for NYPD Blue that would be. FDR insisted on holding the preliminary 1944 United Nations conference in Washington, even though it was August and air-conditioning hadn’t been discovered, and nobody in his right mind was in Washington—not that the arrival of the UN delegat
es changed that. The location for the conference, the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Georgetown, was suggested by young State Department official and communist spy Alger Hiss, and, gee, I wonder if Stalin somehow managed to get microphones planted in the caucus rooms. British representative Sir Alexander Cadogan (who did happen to be in his right mind) called the meeting “a foretaste of hell.”
Absurdity is written right into the United Nations Charter. Says the preamble, “armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest.” What possible “common interest” united still-imperial Britain, rich goofy America, the sleazeball Chiang Kai-shek, and a U.S.S.R. intent on world revolution? The only thing the United Nations is suited for, according to its charter, is an invasion from Mars. This, despite numerous books and movies on the subject, has been slow coming. Then there’s the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, which starts out worthy and high-minded in Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” but by Article 24 has degenerated into “Everybody has the right to rest and leisure, including…periodic holidays with pay.” I took mine as soon as Putin shut up.
Sure, I’d love to be able to say I listened to all 189 member nations’ speeches plus the extras from the League of Arab States, Conference of Presiding Officers of National Parliaments, Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and so on. This would be a great Into Thin Air Everest-climb kind of brag about my ability to endure pain and hardship, but I was starting to lose circulation in my hind end. While I might be willing to sacrifice a frost-bitten finger or two to stand on the roof of the world, I was not about to leave my butt cheeks at the UN.
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 3
