UNITED NATIONS: Extending the Presence

UNITED NATIONS Extending the "Presence" U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold believes in doing good by stealth. He has succeeded in unobtrusively widening the powers of his office by quiet persuasion in private, and by the courage to make imaginative leaps of authority, which he disguises in dull prose. He also considers his jumps well, and has an instinct for not going too far. Without formal instructions from General Assembly or Security Council, he sent a personal representative to be watchdog (a U.N. "presence," he preferred to call it) to Jordan in 1958, one to Thailand to settle a boundary dispute with Cambodia, and another to help the fledgling republic of Guinea in 1959. Last week he applied the same technique in Laos.

A special U.N. subcommittee had reported that it could find no positive proof of actual aggression from Communist North Viet Nam (TIME, Nov. 16), and Russia crowed that Laos' charges had collapsed "like a card castle." At this point, Hammarskjold quietly announced that he himself would fly to get "independent and full knowledge" of what was going on in Laos and though the Russians bluntly declared that Hammarskjold's trip would only "further complicate the situation," he went.

At a dinner in Vientiane, Premier Phoui Sananikone fervently repeated that his country was determined to stay out of the cold war, and Hammarskjold pointedly replied that "all Laos' friends will rejoice in that statement." Five days later, having thus made it clear that he was not on hand to disturb Laotian neutrality (which was imposed by the 1954 Geneva agreement), Hammarskjold was able to proceed with his plan. He invited Economics Expert Sakari Tuomioja, conservative-minded onetime Premier of Finland, to go to Laos as the Secretary-General's personal representative.

Once more Hammarskjold had taken the initiative to get the U.N. "presence" felt without running the risk of a Security Council veto or running afoul of the General Assembly's volatile political alignments. Hammarskjold himself likes to talk of the necessary evolution of his office, and of his competence to take actions "with the consent or at the invitation of governments concerned, but without formal decisions of other organs of the U.N." His authority he finds in Article 99 of the Charter, which empowers the Secretary-General to act in any situation that "may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security." But his real authority consists in having established a reputation for scrupulous moderation and impartiality in enlarging the role of his office.