bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1988) — Winter 1988 // Hiver 1988, pp. 45–47
A Life in Peace and War by Brian Urquhart,
Harper & Row, New York, 1987, 379 pp.,
$U.S. 25.00.
For those Canadians who have been involved in the affairs and activities of the United Nations at any time, from its beginnings in 1945 until 1986, the name of Brian Urquhart has been known and respected as a model of what an international public servant should be. His great ability, his dedication to the organization he served for so many years, his integrity and his courage, have won him the respect and admiration of all who know him, regardless of nationality or political stripe. Fortunately, he also has a talent for writing, as those who have read his book on Hammarskjöld can testify. In this book he has given us as a legacy an account of what went on at the UN during those event-filled forty years. It is not only invaluable as an historical document, but also makes for stimulating reading.
It is particularly appropriate that Urquhart’s autobiography should be published at this moment in the history of the United Nations. The story he tells is eloquent in its detailed but engrossing account of the great many accomplishments over the past forty-odd years to which the Organization can lay claim. It is equally eloquent in pointing out the obstacles and failures resulting from the limitations of governments and individuals, and the legacy of racial, political and religious prejudices which continue to complicate the search for peace.
The book also illustrates with clarity and perception the fact that, when governments are prepared to allow it to do so, the United Nations can make an invaluable contribution towards solving — or at least bettering — some of the terrible problems that beset mankind and are beyond the capacity of Governments acting individually and unilaterally to cope with on their own. Almost incidentally, it testifies to the pivotal role that the author played, particularly in the last ten years, in holding the secretariat together at a time of indifferent leadership.
The book opens with an account of the author’s early life, which, although essentially a preamble to the story of his service with the UN, makes interesting reading on its own account. His father was a scion of a distinguished Scottish family, completely self-centered, with unfulfilled ambition to be a great painter. He left them when Brian was still young, and his mother, who came from Dorset, took the family to her native heath.
In the straitened circumstances of his family he was fortunate to win an entrance scholarship as a King’s Scholar at Westminster School. From Westminster, Urquhart went to Oxford in 1937 on a scholarship, but left university to enlist in the army in September, 1939. He was commissioned in the Dorset Regiment, and after two years of life in the infantry was assigned as intelligence officer to the Airborne Division. It was in that assignment that his strength of character, which was to show itself repeatedly in future years, was first put to the test.
In August of 1944, planning began on the disastrous airborne operation aimed at capturing the bridges across the Rhine at Arnhem and Nijmegen. As the time for launching the operation grew closer, Urquhart’s unease grew stronger. The tension created by his efforts to convince his superiors that his concerns were justified, together with the heavy pressure of getting ready for the operation, undermined his health, and two days before the battle was to begin he was ordered to go on sick leave. A few days later, when the extent of the disaster had become obvious, he was recalled to duty and sent to the Airborne Corps headquarters in Nijmegen. But by then all that was left to do was to extricate themselves from an untenable situation.
In the circumstances Urquhart found that his position had become an embarrassment. “There is nothing like proving to be right for making a person unpopular.” By mutual agreement with his Corps Commander he was transferred to a strategic and technical intelligence unit which had the task of securing and investigating “targets” as they were liberated by the advancing Allied forces.
At war’s end, when it looked as if he might be stuck in the occupation army for an indefinite period, Professor Arnold Toynbee, who headed the Foreign Office Research Department at the time, intervened to ask for his services. Urquhart was demobilized forthwith. After a few weeks with the Foreign Office, he was recruited as private secretary to Gladwin Jebb, who had been appointed as Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations. His career with the United Nations had begun. In the next two hundred pages Urquhart walks us through forty years of front-page events as seen by one who was actively involved in most of them. His education in the amoral manoeuvrings of the Great Powers began at the first session of the General Assembly, when the Americans changed signals unbeknownst to many of their friends and switched support from Trygve Lie to Paul-Henri Spaak for election as the first President. Almost by default Lie was then selected to be the first Secretary- General.
Urquhart was transferred to Lie’s staff as one of his personal assistants. He didn’t find it an easy assignment:
“I felt sorry for Lie. He had had an honorable career in Norway as a labor leader…and had gone into exile in England as foreign minister…He was credited with having ordered ships of the Norwegian Merchant Marine at sea in 1940 to report to British ports. But as Secretary-General of the new world organization he was out of his depth… He was a naturally suspicious man with a hair-trigger temper…jealous of his position and at the same time nervous of it.”
Although Urquhart was acutely conscious of the political dimensions of the UN, in particular the Security Council and General Assembly, his primary concern was with the efforts of the secretariat to fulfil its responsibilities. The role of the Secretary- General in determining what this should be is decisive, and, not surprisingly, the account which follows tends to divide itself into the terms of office of the four leaders under whom he served.
The opening chapters of the UN story cover the Lie years, from 1945 to 1952. They include the decision to set up the Headquarters in New York; the creation of Israel, the assassination of Bernadotte and the Arab-Israeli war; the Korean war and the problems it created for Lie in dealing with the Russians; McCarthyism and the secretariat; the unexpected decision of Lie to resign in 1952, and the election of Hammarskjöld as his replacement.
The Security Council thought that in nominating Hammarskjöld they were selecting a cautious, safe and non-political technocrat who would avoid controversial political actions.
“In this belief the distinguished permanent members of the Security Council were delightfully mistaken, for Hammarskjöld was an exceptional man with a strong and independent sense of mission… [His] election gave the United Nations eight years of dynamic, and often visionary leadership.”
The chapters dealing with • the Hammarskjöld period are particularly interesting because they cover Suez and the opening phase of the U.N.’s involvement in the Congo, in which Urquhart was personally involved, at great risk to himself, as resident representative in Katanga.
Hammarskjöld was killed in 1961. But if he had lived he would have had great difficulty in coping with the virulent opposition of the USSR and the dissatisfaction of the French. In 1960 Kruschev had advocated that the Secretary-General be replaced by a troika, and when U Thant was chosen as the new Secretary-General, his initial appointment was on an acting basis for one year. During his term in office he faced the problems of bringing the war in the Congo to a conclusion and of the 1967 war in the Middle East, which resulted in the end of the first United Nations Emergency Force.
Canadians will find the account of the circumstances which led to the decision to withdraw UNEF particularly interesting. The Canadian Government was highly critical of U Thant’s decision to acquiesce in the demand of Nasser that the Force be removed from Egypt without consulting the Security Council or the General Assembly. But as Urquhart (and presumably also U Thant and Bunche) saw it, to attempt to resort to the General Assembly would be a futile gesture, since a large number of governments supported the Egyptian position. As for resort to the Security Council, this would have been impractical because UNEF was a creature of the General Assembly, and agreement in the Council on what should be done would be impossible to obtain.
“There was one way U Thant could have escaped [the responsibility for the decision to evacuate the force.] This was for the Secretary-General to summon the Security Council under Article 99 of the Charter to consider the situation as a threat to international peace and security. U Thant knew that if he did this, the Council’s proceedings would decline into an undignified brawl along East-West lines, as indeed it did later when the Council met at the request of Denmark and Canada. He declined to take this way out. In retrospect I for one greatly regret U Thant’s refusal to pass the buck, and I wish we had pressed him harder to do so.”
In the circumstances Bunche and Urquhart decided that the best course of action was to take the maximum time possible to make withdrawal arrangements, to give time to try and talk Nasser around. However, their strategy was undermined by what in their view was the unrealistic positions being taken by Western governments.
“The Egyptian government was deeply provoked by an announcement from Ottawa that two Canadian warships were being moved to the Mediterranean and by bellicose Canadian statements insisting on UNEF’s right to stay in Egypt as if it was an occupation force. When Egypt riposted by declaring that, because of these statements, it could no longer assure the safety of Canadian soldiers in UNEF and demanded their withdrawal, the Canadian contingent was withdrawn in forty-eight hours, leaving UNEF with no logistic units or aircraft.”
It is interesting to compare Urquhart’s view of events with the recollections of Paul Martin in his memoirs. As a convinced supporter of the concept of the United Nations, he believed strongly that the General Assembly, or failing that, the Security Council, should have been convened and faced with the responsibility for dealing with the matter. So far as the Canadians were concerned the warships were to facilitate the evacuation of the Canadian troops if that should prove necessary, and Canadian diplomacy was being exerted to curb the initiatives of some of our more bellicose friends. It just goes to prove the truth of the old adage that the game looks different depending on where you sit in the grandstand.
Urquhart’s assessment is that these events, and the war that followed, dealt the UN a crushing blow, and caused irreparable psychological damage to U Thant and Bunche.
“The United Nations had been shown to be divided and ineffective… The fact that the real cause of the war was the unresolved and bitter conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors could be safely ignored in favor of an identifiable scapegoat. In the interminable meetings of the Security Council during and after the war, the futility and frequent pettiness of a divided membership made a mockery of the Charter’s primary aim of maintaining international peace.”
Could the war have been prevented? Urquhart believes that Nasser was convinced that he could defeat Israel and was determined to fight. If U Thant had convened the Security Council at the outset, the result would have been the same, “but the scapegoat would have escaped.”
In December of 1971, U Thant was succeeded by Kurt Waldheim as Secretary- General.
“Waldheim, it has now become clear, lied for nearly forty years about his war record, presumably believing that the truth would stand in the way of his relentless pursuit of public positions and office…The Waldheim episode is above all an indictment of the way in which governments, and especially the great powers, select the world’s leading international civil servant. Although good men have been elected, looking for the person with the qualities best suited to this infinitely demanding and important job seems to hold a very low priority for governments. Rather, political differences dictate a search for a candidate who will not exert any troubling degree of leadership, commitment, originality, or independence.” Urquhart comments that most of the pages dealing with this period were written before the hue and cry about Waldheim’s war record, but he didn’t change them. He gives him credit for being conscientious, hardworking and ready to accept ideas and suggestions. He was never too tired or too indifferent to undertake an awkward journey or make a difficult telephone call. But he was a ditherer, hating to come down on one side or the other when dealing with a contentious issue.
During Waldheim’s term in office the UN was involved in the October, 1973, war in the Middle East, which led to the reestablishment of UNEF and the creation of the force on the Golan Heights, the renewal of hostilities in Cyprus, the Lebanon crisis of 1978, and the efforts to obtain independence for Namibia.
“Waldheim’s travel program for 1981 left no doubt that he was hell-bent on running for a third term…I continued to deal with Waldheim Mark II, the dedicated, far-seeing public servant and statesman, while my colleagues fretted under Waldheim Mark I, the scheming and obsessively ambitious bureaucrat.”
But all the Secretary-General’s efforts were for naught. When the Security Council failed to reach agreement on the two main candidates, by a process of informal straw polls Javier Perez de Cuellar was selected.
“I had known Perez de Cuellar well for many years…He was well-qualified by experience and ability — a quiet, highly intelligent and civilized man with a wide knowledge of the job he was undertaking. Whether he was too civilized, or too lacking in ego or cutting edge, remained to be seen. The fact was that out of an apparently hopeless situation a reasonable and qualified Secretary-General had emerged.”
The closing chapters of the book touch on the Falkland Islands war, Namibia, the situation in the Middle East, and the financial crisis in the UN, which he correctly identifies as being more properly a political crisis, involving all governments, but especially the major powers. The behaviour of the Soviet Union had almost never been supportive of the efforts of the Secretariat in fulfilling its peacemaking function, but now the Western governments seemed also to have gone off on a unilateralist path. His description of the Thatcher approach is worth quoting:
“At first glance Mrs. Thatcher seemed to combine the characteristics of La Pasionaria, the girls of St. Trinians, and Mrs. Miniver. She seemed to believe that the United Nations was, or should be, primarily the instrument for asserting Western values to the world.” His description of President Reagan’s speech at the fortieth anniversary session of the General Assembly is equally pungent:
“His speech was evidently designed to score points at home off the Soviet Union before the upcoming Geneva Summit. He scarcely mentioned the United Nations except to praise the 1950 Korean War and the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, and his list of regional conflicts which should be discussed with the Soviet Union omitted the Middle East…At the conclusion of this performance the main body of the United States Delegation left the hall, leaving only junior officials to listen to Mrs. Thatcher, Rajiv Ghandi, and the Prime Minister of China. Both statesmanship and good manners took a considerable beating… The United Nations fortieth anniversary celebration, if it did nothing else, dramatically highlighted the need for new international leadership.”
My personal association and friendship with Brian Urquhart go back to 1955, when we were both involved in the creation of the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Over the years since that time until I retired in 1980, I had the opportunity, as a member of the Canadian Delegation and the Canadian Mission, to work with him on many of the issues described in his book. It was therefore a source of great satisfaction to me that in 1987 Brian was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1988) — Winter 1988 // Hiver 1988, pp. 45–47. Read the rest of this issue →
