United Nations: Battlefield of Peace

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Slowly, with dignity, dapper little Mongi Slim of Tunisia walked up the seven steps to the green marble rostrum and took his seat as president of the United Nations' 16th General Assembly. Before him were the diplomats who had elected him, a motley crowd of delegates from every corner of the world. "It is hard for me to express the great grief I experience," said President Slim, speaking in French. "The Secretary-General of the United Nations fell a victim to his duty. He died, one might say, on the battlefield of peace."

At these words, , the eyes of the listening delegates flickered to the place on Mongi Slim's right—Dag Hammarskjold's empty chair.

Once again the delegates had come to the U.N. with a dizzying assortment of problems and causes, ranging from nuclear tests and Red China's demand for recognition, to apartheid, Algerian freedom, South Tyrol terrorism and the future of Ruanda-Urundi. Everyone was only too eager to dump all the issues on the U.N.'s desks, whether there was any real prospect of solution or not. But all the possible agenda items seemed to fade beside the loss of Dag Hammarskjold. Every delegate knew that the whole future of the U.N. as a meaningful force for peace was in jeopardy. The U.N. now might well again become what it was all too often before the Hammarskjold era—a glass-and-steel soapbox.

Big & Little Hope. The U.N. was founded 16 years ago amid great expectations that were based on large hope but little reality. There was among the earnest founders at the San Francisco conference no common law, no common principle, no common view of man or the world—only a ritualistic insistence that mankind must have some sort of security from war.* After years of worldwide incantations about support for the U.N. and worldwide disillusionment with its performance, Dag Hammarskjold did one thing—he reduced the great but impossible hope of U.N. as the molder of world peace to the small but possible hope of U.N. as an arbiter, and even a policeman, in relatively minor trouble areas where the interests of the great nations were not directly involved.

Hammarskjold pushed that hope to its limits, and perhaps beyond, in the Congo. It is likely that, had he lived, his effectiveness as Secretary-General might have been near its end, anyway. The fact remains that as the exponent of the limited hope he had performed great service, the best measure of which was that the Russians had vowed to destroy him and his office ever since last year when he moved U.N. troops into the chaotic Congo, thus preventing a Moscow-run regime. A favorite motto of his was a quotation from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; one should, he said,

...hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

Last week even the limited U.N. hope was close to being wrecked; and the U.S., which lately has relied heavily, perhaps too heavily, on the U.N., stood committed to save what it could of the wreckage.

The U.S. must perform this salvage operation in a vastly changed U.N. The