Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  || “But for the present we can only make use of the United Nations as best we may, as a diplomatic weapon, and through it we may hope that perhaps more friendly relations can be established with Russia. But as far as military policy is concerned I see no choice except to disregard the United Nations …” (Congressional Record, January 5, 1951). It is clear from the general context of this strongly anti-communist speech that Senator Taft, while he genuinely believed in the United Nations as “a forum for discussion,” and a safety-valve, did not envisage a “diplomatic weapon” primarily as a means for bringing about the problematical “more friendly relations … with Russia” (see above, page 202, footnote). A British observer was more explicit about the real functions of the diplomatic weapon: “And however clear the need to defend Western outposts might seem to ministers and officials, on an issue that might easily appear both obscure and remote to the electorate the moral backing of the U.N. might well be instrumental in rallying the necessary public support [by an] U.N. endorsement of military action by the NATO powers” (Goodwin, Britain and the United Nations, p. 248). The same observer realized, however, that a diplomatic weapon was something one could cut oneself with. It was not, he wrote, “impossible to envisage cases in which a two-thirds majority [in the Assembly] against Britain might be mobilized” (ibid.).

  ** “By 1958, it was noted in Moscow, the Afro-Asian states held a third of the Assembly’s seats. This gave them a collective veto, since important Assembly resolutions require a majority of two to one and can be defeated by a ‘blocking third.’ Soviet commentators gleefully argued that ‘the American voting machine was no longer working’” (Boyd, United Nations: Piety, Myth and Truth, p. 38).

  †† Servant of Peace; a Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, 1953–1961, edited and introduced by Wilder Foote. See especially pp. 37, 46–7, 136, 150, 198, 227, 259, 353. The evolution of Hammarskjöld’s thought on this matter is too complex to be analysed here. It can, however, be said that in his thinking the “instrument” tended to become more important and the “agents” (Council and Assembly) rather less. Compare:

  “The Secretary-General does not suffer from the fact that he has nobody to refer back to provided that the main organs of the United Nations—the Security Council or the General Assembly—have taken clear decisions on general terms of reference, short of which, of course, the Secretary-General is forced to undertake a kind of policy-making which from the point of view of member governments I feel may be considered unsound” (Press Conference of April 4, 1957; in Speeches, p. 136).

  “If negotiations are necessary, or if arrangements with a certain intended political impact are to be made, but Member nations are not in a position to lay down exact terms of reference, a natural response of the Organization is to use the services of the Secretary-General for what they may be worth” (Statement of May 1, 1960; Speeches, p. 259).

  The shift in emphasis is remarkable. Failure by the main organs to provide clear terms of reference is regarded in the 1957 press conference as a regrettable situation from which the Secretary-General “suffers” and in which he may be “forced” into activities which “may be considered unsound.” By 1960, the note of misgiving has entirely disappeared and it becomes simply “natural” that the Secretary-General should act without “exact terms of reference.” But the 1960 line is foreshadowed in some of the earlier statements (Speeches, p. 150).

  ‡‡ In the Cause of Peace, p. 388.

  §§ Ibid., p. 394.

  ¶¶ Ibid., p. 397.

  *** “… one of the UN’s most striking characteristics is the extent to which it has frustrated the Communist powers’ hopes of directing the Afro-Asian anti-colonial movement” (Boyd, United Nations: Piety, Myth and Truth, p. 182). There is truth in this, but it must be remembered that the Afro-Asian group at the United Nations is far from being fully representative of the Afro-Asian anti-colonial movement. Many of the African delegates in particular, notably most of those who speak French so well, represent governments which were set up precisely as barriers against the anti-colonial movement, and their philosophy of “African independence” is very similar to that of Moise Tshombe. It is true, however, that the genuinely “anti-colonial” governments do also—for different reasons—reject any Communist attempts to give them a lead, and that this is reflected in the United Nations.

  ††† Boyd, United Nations: Piety, Myth and Truth, pp. 32–33.

  THE UNITED NATIONS, THE CONGO AND THE TSHOMBE GOVERNMENT*

  This morning at the Carnegie Endowment Institute in Diplomacy seminar I was asked a significant question: whether the government which has just been formed in the Congo is not conclusive proof of the failure of the United Nations in the Congo? The answer is clearly “yes” if we look at the matter from the viewpoint of the government—Lumumba’s government—which invited in the United Nations force. Lumumba asked the United Nations forces in so as to get rid of the Belgian forces which had then invaded the Congo, and so as to enable his government to re-establish its authority over the whole country, ending the secession of Katanga, organized by Tshombe and Munongo in the interests of the Union Minière and other powerful foreign companies. Today Lumumba is dead, and his followers deprived of influence in the capital. The secession of Katanga is indeed ended, and by the United Nations, but the rulers of Katanga, Tshombe and Munongo, with their Western financial backing and Western state backing are installed in power over the whole Congo. When Lumumba called in the United Nations against Tshombe and Munongo and their Belgian backers, he certainly did not imagine—and neither did anyone else—that when the United Nations forces left the Congo, it would be a Congo ruled by Tshombe and Munongo, generally, and I believe rightly, regarded as Lumumba’s murderers.

  The part played by the United Nations in this chain of events was important, though it has not yet fully emerged. It is certain, however, that the United Nations representatives in Leopoldville played an important part in Lumumba’s downfall, and in bringing about the situation in which Western influence became predominant in Leopoldville. The United Nations after long hesitation and after Lumumba’s death also played an important, indeed decisive, part in ending the secesssion of Katanga. The net outcome of Lumumba’s downfall and death, followed by the ending of the secession of Katanga, has been the unexpected and paradoxical one of the installation of the former secessionists, Lumumba’s murderers, at the head of the state from which they seceded, Tshombe taking the place of his victim.

  Nothing quite like this has ever happened before. If we were to take a parallel in American history, it would be as if, at the end of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis had been elected President in place of Lincoln, with, for Vice-President, John Wilkes Booth. The parallel is not exact—for there was no United Nations in those days—but it does give an idea of the dimensions of the paradox and of the feelings about the present government of those Congolese—and they are not few—who felt about the murder of Lumumba as the North felt about the murder of Lincoln.

  This is how the situation seems if we look at it from what we may imagine to be Lumumba’s viewpoint. The United Nations intervention, from that viewpoint, seems not so much a failure—the word is too weak—as a ghastly betrayal and catastrophe. As a precedent it is, still from this point of view, a sinister one. Any future prime minister of a newly independent country, facing a situation in which he has to consider calling in the United Nations, will be slow indeed, thinking of the fate of Lumumba, to come to a positive decision. And African countries generally will be more cautious than they would have been in 1960 about looking to the United Nations for intervention in places like Angola and Mozambique.

  When I move, as I now propose to do, to consider these events from the point of view, not of what Lumumba was asking the United Nations to do, but of what the United Nations itself came in to do, I shall have to present a somewhat different picture, or rather, the same picture but in a different persp
ective. This does not mean, however, that I think that what might be called the Lumumba’s-eye view of the transaction—what I have just tried to present—is either irrelevant or insignificant. On the contrary, as one who played a part in the United Nations effort in Katanga, a part which I believed to be in the interests not only of world peace but of the Congolese people and of Africa, I cannot help feeling horror and indignation at an outcome in which, as it seems to me, foreign interests have clearly prevailed, not without some collusion on the part of some members of the United Nations Secretariat, over those of the Congolese people. If the net result of all that effort was to put Tshombe and what he represents in the place of Lumumba and what he represented, then many of us were indeed naïve about what we thought we were doing in the Congo.

  Let us, however, without losing sight of what actually happened in the Congo, now try to look at matters from the point of view of the United Nations. The primary purpose of the United Nations is not to help member countries to preserve their unity and independence: the primary, and overriding, purpose of the United Nations is to prevent international war from breaking out: to avert threats to the peace.

  The situation in July 1960 constituted not merely a potential threat to the peace but an actual breach of the peace: mutiny followed by invasion. It was invasion—for the Belgian troops intervened without any request from the Government of the Congo, as required by the Treaty of Friendship. This limited breach of peace constituted a potential threat to peace on a large scale. Antoine Gizenga’s appeal on behalf of the Government of the Congo to the United States (July 12, 1960) for military intervention in order to expel the Belgians put the United States in a dilemma because of its relation to its NATO allies. The United States did not accept, but a simple refusal might lead to a Russian “takeover.” Therefore the United States favoured a United Nations solution. The Soviets could have blocked this but did not because they were reluctant to fly in the face of African opinion and also to run the risk of war. They therefore agreed to the sending of a United Nations force.

  The result was that the threat to world peace was for the moment averted, and a situation was created in which Belgium’s allies could quietly press her to extricate herself from her untenable position. The withdrawal of Belgian troops—the troops of the Belgian state—was completed in the latter part of 1961. This ended the actual breach of the peace—the war situation between two sovereign states.

  Thus, the United Nations could claim that, in the Congo, it succeeded in averting a threat to the peace of Africa and the world, that it liquidated the military adventure of a colonialist power against an ex-colony, and that that in itself rendered such adventures less likely for the future. Since it was not in the interest of Africa as a whole, any more than of the Congo in particular, that the Congo should become a Korea, or that the former metropolitan powers should deem themselves at liberty to ignore the governments of the new states and interfere at their good pleasure, the United Nations can therefore claim to have rendered, in the Congo, important services to Africa as well as to the world.

  Now there is a considerable measure of truth in these claims. The outbreak of a world struggle in the heart of Africa would indeed have been a hideous disaster and not least for the continent of Africa. We cannot, of course, be sure that without the United Nations there would have been an international clash over the Congo in 1960; but certainly without the mechanism of adjustment, the face-saving equipment, which the United Nations provides, the risk of such a clash would have been much greater. It is true that, if any of the great powers had been bent on war, in this or any other situation, there would be very little the United Nations could do about it. But the United Nations does provide, and did provide in this case, the means whereby the powers can avoid the kind of confrontation in which it becomes very difficult for them to avoid war without grave loss of face. An organization like the United Nations if it had existed in 1914 might, with luck, have prevented a war which none of the really great powers desired. It could have done this by helping to gain time, by arousing world opinion to the general danger to humanity, by providing an open forum in which the powers could let off steam and give satisfaction to public opinion at home, and by providing also, at the same time and in the same building, private meeting-grounds where the public antagonists could seek a formula based on their common interests in preventing general war.

  These are the ways in which the United Nations works and they represent a form of functional adjustment on the success of which the lives of all of us depend. We cannot therefore afford—even when we criticize most strongly a given United Nations action or operation—to talk as if the United Nations were not indispensable. When we say, as we may on this or that occasion, that the United Nations has “failed” we must remember that as long as the United Nations continues to function as a mechanism of adjustment, and as long as world war remains averted, the United Nations has not yet failed in its primary purpose. None of us, whether we live in the West or in the communist countries, or in the non-aligned world, can afford to ignore or neglect, or underestimate the United Nations.

  Let us accept the hypothesis that, by sending troops to the Congo in 1960, the United Nations averted, or helped the major powers to avert, an occasion of international war.

  Two things remain to be said: first, the peace was not preserved without bargains and sacrifices, and the sacrifices were of a specific kind; second, as a result of these bargains and sacrifices the threat to the peace, which existed on the arrival of the United Nations forces, has arisen again on their departure in a new and perhaps more intractable form—a form, moreover, which may have the gravest implications for Africa as a whole.

  As regards the first aspect—the bargains and sacrifices—it is necessary to make one or two preliminary points. The first is that we are apt to assume too easily that the only people who play power politics are the war-mongers. This is not correct: the peacemongers like, for example, the late Dag Hammarskjöld, have to play their version of power politics too, because international politics is power politics. Peace is preserved by compromises, and compromises between great powers are usually at the expense of someone else. I shall take an example remote from Africa—the case of Hungary in 1956. This was a case in which one great power, the United States, found itself on the brink of war, by reason of a limited aggressive action by the other great power, the Soviet Union. The position of the United Nations in relation to the “Warsaw Pact” situation in Hungary was comparable in many ways to the Soviet position in face of the “NATO-backed” intervention in the Congo. In each case the power which might have considered itself provoked and have come to the rescue of the injured party decided instead—and it is well for world peace that it did—to “play it cool” and to use the United Nations as the instrument for playing it this way.

  In the Congo, somewhat similar considerations applied. Mr. Hammarskjöld had to negotiate the departure of the Belgian troops, who were—from the international point of view—the most obvious danger to peace. In this he had Congolese opinion behind him and African opinion also; he also had United States support, but only conditionally. The implied conditions of United States support were that the United Nations forces should not come into conflict with Belgian forces and that the conditions of departure of these forces should not be such as to benefit the Communists. Britain, France and Belgium insisted that this meant “hands off Tshombe,” and the United States under the Eisenhower government accepted this view. Mr. Hammarskjöld, perhaps perforce, accepted it also. But the policy of “hands off Tshombe” brought Lumumba’s government into collision with the United Nations and the United States and—once he had appealed for Soviet aid—sealed his doom. The United Nations, in the person of Mr. Andrew Cordier, took the critical decision—the closing of the radio and airports—which made a Lumumba comeback impossible.

  In effect, Lumumba was sacrificed because he had become an obstacle in the way of the only kind of peace Hammarskjöld felt he could ma
ke workable in the United Nations—a peaceful withdrawal of the Belgians negotiated with the West European NATO countries, through reliance on unconditional African, and conditional American, support.

  That the sacrifice was rational does not make it any less bitter or its consequences less grave. Not only Lumumba but Hammarskjöld also paid the price of these consequences with their own lives. The destruction of Lumumba, his principal colleagues and his party meant the destruction of the only—albeit rudimentary—national movement in the Congo. It left no Congolese parties except parties based on a single tribe or on outside support and these categories overlap widely. That is to say that, when after long delays and vacillations, the secession of Katanga was liquidated—as a result of African pressure and the change of policies of the United States in the revulsion after Lumumba’s murder—by the time this happened, Congolese Constitutional politics had become about as real as those of, say, eighteenth-century Poland. Political circles in Leopoldville, purged, corrupted and intimidated, became more representative of opinions in board rooms in Brussels, London, Paris and New York than of any real currents of opinion in the Congo. So Tshombe, the tried, tested friend of such board rooms, became Prime Minister of the Congo.

  The new threat to the peace comes sharply to the fore. For the new government in the Congo will have against it not only dissatisfied tribal groups—as any Congo government is likely to have—but also all that widespread and tenacious, if badly organized, national feeling which the name of Lumumba has come to represent. And these forces have on their side, if as yet rather impalpably, a far more implacable and adventurous enemy of Western influences than the Soviet Union ever was: the People’s Republic of China. And the mere shadow of a possibility of Chinese influence is likely to lead the United States, in line with its present policies elsewhere, to commit itself ever more deeply behind puppet regimes. In short the Congo, formerly threatened with the fate of Korea, is now threatened with that of Vietnam.