"Wrongheaded and Unjustified"

At the U.N. the Third World rises up against a false friend

The climax was almost preordained, and yet it came with surprising speed. After four days of debate had passed and 74 delegates had followed each other to the speaker's podium of the United Nations General Assembly, it was now time to vote. The Assembly's Tanzanian president, Salim Ahmed Salim, invited the 152 delegations to record their votes on two electronic boards behind the rostrum. The boards suddenly lit up as the delegates pushed the buttons at their desks--green for yes, red for no, amber for abstention. After just three minutes, Salim coolly revealed the outcome: 104 votes in favor, 18 against, 18 abstentions. "The draft resolution is therefore adopted," he declared.

In the crowded chamber that had witnessed such historic events as Soviet shoe banging and papal appeals for peace, there was no perceptible change in the low buzz of conversation. But everyone there knew that the Soviet Union had just been publicly rebuked by those nations of the world that it had professed to champion. It was Moscow's most spectacular diplomatic humiliation since the U.N. condemnation of the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Though the Soviet Union was not mentioned by name, the resolution just passed by a lopsided vote of more than 5 to 1 was an outright condemnation of Moscow's invasion of Afghanistan. The "armed intervention," it said, was "inconsistent" with the U.N. principle of the "sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state." It thus demanded "the immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of the foreign troops from Afghanistan" and called on U.N. members and international relief organizations to help all Afghan refugees. The last of the resolution's eight points required the Security Council to "consider ways and means" to help enforce the resolution.

For Oleg Troyanovsky, 60, Moscow's representative at the U.N. since 1976 and only the seventh Soviet ambassador there in 35 years, the vote was a galling blow. It followed by a bare week his own application of the Soviet veto to an almost identically worded resolution during a 13 to 2 vote in the Security Council. Only a day before the Afghan resolution, in fact, Troyanovsky had used another veto--the Soviet Union's 114th--to stave off an otherwise successful U.S. drive to impose U.N. sanctions on Iran.

For Americans, it was refreshing to hear Third World countries denounce Moscow with the vehemence they usually reserve for attacks on the "imperialism" of the West. Said Singapore's highly respected U.N. ambassador, T.T.B.

Koh: "The fight over Afghanistan was led by small countries from the Third World who had the courage to get together and take risks. We were able to convince our colleagues not to accept the Soviet version of history."

That work of persuasion was sparklingly successful. Though Afghanistan's new Foreign Minister, Shah Mohammed Dost, flew in to declare that the Soviets were welcome in his land, dozens of delegates from small and fledgling countries rose to ridicule the Soviet line. Asked Papua-New Guinea's ambassador, Paulias N. Matane: "Should we accept the argument, then, that President Amin [of Afghanistan] invited the Soviet troops to overthrow his own government and eventually kill him? I find that hard to believe." Pakistan's Agha Shahi, who flew in to co-sponsor the anti-Soviet resolution, was more blunt: "A nonexistent threat of an invasion [is] obviously being advanced to justify the large-scale dispatch of Soviet troops into Afghanistan."

An overwhelming majority of Third World nations agreed: "No arguments can be used to justify that intervention," said Nigeria. "It is a wrong-headed and unjustified act," said Iraq. "We refuse to be a pawn in the hands of any power bloc," said Zaire.

Nowhere was the U.N. revolt against Moscow more apparent than in the breakdown of the voting itself. Of the 18 countries opposing the resolution, only one --tiny Grenada, with a population of 100,000--was not ruled by a Communist regime. (Among Communist states, China, Cambodia, Yugoslavia and Albania voted against Moscow.) Fully 57 members of the Nonaligned Movement, over which Cuba currently presides, supported the resolution, and only nine followed the Soviet line. Among Muslim countries, the swing was even more drastic. Eighteen condemned the Soviet action and only two, Afghanistan and South Yemen, opposed the majority.

Some 18 cautious states, including India, Algeria and Syria, abstained, and an eclectic group of twelve states did not vote at all. Noting that these included Bhutan, Rumania and South Africa, the New York Times caustically dubbed the nonvoters as "The Confused, the Brave and the Outcast." (One of these last was the Sudan, which was $65,000 behind in its U.N. dues and could raise only $40,000 before the count began, thus failing to qualify to vote.)

The U.N. condemnation will have no immediate effect upon the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, as almost all supporters of the resolution were willing to concede. More important, however, was the message to Moscow about its image in the world. Said a U.N. official: "The vision of the Soviet Union as a defender of the nonaligned peoples in the world has been shattered. The Russians care about the votes here because they are very image-conscious." For one Western ambassador, this had a measurable political significance. Said he: "In thinking of their next possible adventure, I believe what happened in Afghanistan will provide another ingredient in the Soviets' decision-making process."

Still more important, in the eyes of most observers, was the profound shift in allegiances in the U.N. membership as a whole. The Soviets had lost votes before, often in the Security Council, but they had almost always been able to limit the damage by casting a veto against resolutions of substance. Last week's debacle, however, was the first occasion when a more than two-thirds majority of the U.N.'s 152 members had challenged and overridden the veto specifically to condemn Moscow's actions. For some 2 1/2 decades, Moscow had been virtually assured of U.N. support every time a debate was directed at "imperialism," "colonialism" or "Zionism," simply by the preponderance of former Western colonial territories among the nearly 100 new nations that joined the U.N. in that period.

This very influx of Asian and African countries, many of them small and most of them poor, contributed to widespread disillusionment with the U.N. among many Americans, who for years had paid more than 25% of U.N. expenses. The organization that had once symbolized the world's hope for peace had come to seem little more than an anti-Western debating society. In 1974 President Ford warned against the "tyranny of the majority" at the U.N. Even more scornful was the eloquent and combative U.S. delegate during 1975 and '76, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When a U.N. special committee insisted that U.S. military forces on the Virgin Islands (consisting of 14 Coastguardsmen, a shotgun, a pistol and a boat) were a military threat to the region, Moynihan mocked the General Assembly as a "theater of the absurd."

But although Cold War conflicts and repeated Soviet use of the veto had long ago deprived the U.N. of power to enforce its views, it has retained a role of some value. For one thing, the U.N. provides the only arena where diplomats of all persuasions can meet and deal in private. For another, it can provide a mechanism, in areas of limited agreement, for such peace-keeping forces as those that guard Cyprus and southern Lebanon. For yet another, it is the only forum in which the world can state a collective view. And finally, it provides a wide variety of technical assistance--shelter for refugees, rice and malaria pills for the sick and destitute. Says U.S. Ambassador Donald McHenry: "You can use the U.N. to blow off steam, to express moral outrage, to exert political pressure." Adds U.N. Under Secretary-General Brian Urquhart, a 35 year veteran: "In emergencies, the U.N. is extremely useful. The U.N. can alter attitudes, and that's a beginning, a mighty important one, these days."

That alteration is not expected to provide the U.S. with any permanent new allies. Delegate after delegate insisted last week that the nonaligned want to remain nonaligned. For once, however, they could express the world's conscience, and the clumsy, unwieldy, hypocritical and inefficient U.N. provided the only way in which they could do so.

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