UNITED NATIONS: Challenge to Authority

From steamy Léopoldville, five top officers from the new Congo government, leaving chaos behind, came racing across the Atlantic toward Manhattan. In the skyscraping U.N. building on the East River, international bureaucrats hurriedly set the stage for an emergency meeting of the Security Council. At the very moment that U.N. troops had seemingly restored stability to the Congo (see below), the intractable problems of that turbulent land flared into new crisis.

From the start, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had handled the troubles of the Congo with brisk diplomatic skill, using them, among other things, to enhance the U.N.'s prestige and authority. But as always, Hammarskjold and the U.N. were crippled by one overriding weakness: the U.N.'s inability to counter the threat of force with threatened force of its own. When one defiant man—Premier Moise Tshombe of the Congo's rebellious Katanga province—threatened resistance to the U.N. forces, all Hammarskjold's carefully laid plans went agley.

To the Security Council, Hammarskjold presented two clear choices as to what to do next. The Council could authorize him to send U.N. forces into Katanga ready to shoot. Or, as Dag plainly favored, the Council could offer Tshombe assurance that the presence of U.N. troops would not be used to force Katanga to submit to the Congo government.

Tunisia and Ceylon had already drafted a resolution embodying Hammarskjold's second alternative, but had coupled with it a demand that Belgium withdraw its troops from Katanga. The U.S.—with European fires to watch as well—was reluctant to press harried Belgium too hard, but ready to go along. Soviet Russia, however, seemed to want nothing more than continued chaos in the Congo. Russian Delegate Vasily Kuznetzov dismissed the Afro-Asian resolution as too wishy-washy, suggested to fellow delegates that if the U.N. troops presently in the Congo could not eject the Belgians, the U.N. should send troops that would. The Russians also let it be known that Soviet troops would be only too happy to take on the task.

The bulk of the Security Council members clearly favored Hammarskjold's approach. The Russians, though they might lose no opportunity to prove what vigilant protectors they are of new African nations, almost certainly had no intention of making good on their talk of armed intervention in the Congo. The situation was a diplomat's kind of crisis: nothing so flamboyant as war was in prospect, but the times required skilled diplomacy so that a new, unready but proud nation could get off to the right kind of start.