on this question, with absence of help from the big powers. This year the resolution provides funding for one of the liberation groups' offices, and for a transmitter to broadcast into Namibia-questionable items, therefore abstention is not marked wrong, but only no score. Vote: 96 in favor, none against, 14 abstentions, in Fourth Committee. 18. Charter of Economic Rights and Duties: Yes-right; No-wrong; Abstain-no score. A Magna Carta or a hoax, depending on whom you talk to. Probably neither one, but a painful first step toward a statement of international responsibility in the area. The industrialized western countries wanted amendments easier on their multinational corporations concerning compensation for nationalization, etc., main reason for their votes. Votes: 120 in favor; 6 against (Belgium, Denmark, West Germany, Luxberg, UK, US); 10 abstentions. 19. Peaceful Settlement of Disputes: Yes-right; No-wrong; Abstain-no score. A fine resolution stressing the importance and value of using the UN Charter provisions for settlement of disputes by negotiation, conciliation, arbitration, with the UN as third party when helpful. Although an endorsement of motherhood, some states were hoodwinked by a USSR campaign against it, a country which wants everything settled only by bilateral negotiations. Votes: 69 in favor; 10 against, 35 abstentions. 20. Human Rights in Chile: Yes-right; No-wrong; Abstain-no score. Although the UN is political in its choice of human rights issues (Chile is a USSR favorite), the resolution was good one and well-sponsored, and unfortunately, there is no doubt about the severity of the repression of rights in Chile. Vote: 90 in favor, 8 against (all Latin), and 26 abstentions. MALI MAURITANIA MAURITIUS MEXICO MONGOLIA MOROCCO NETHERLANDS NEW ZEAL AND +R +0 +R AR to AR +R +R+R +R +R +RAR +R-R +R+R+R+R+R INLAND FRANCE GABON GAMBIA GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC -69 1 2 3 4 5 ć 789 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20. to +R +R+R +RAW +R GERMANY, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF +R TO AO AR - R GHANA GREECE GRENADA GUATEMALA GUINEA GUINEA-BISSAU HONDURAS INDIA INDONESIA IRAN IRAQ RELAND 1SRAEL ITALY IVORY COAST JAMAICA JAPAN JORDAN KENYA KHMER REPUBLIC KUWAIT LAOS LEBANON LESOTHO LIBERIA LIBYAN ARAB REPUBLIC LUXEMBOURG MADAGASCAR MALAWI MALAYSIA MALDIVES to to to AR 43 165 78 83 +R+R +R AW 60 80 TR +8 +8 +8 +8 63 53 78 80 40 70 43 78 70 83 88 70 185 55 73 185 70. 95 80 83 175 178 [From the New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1975] THE UNITED STATES VERSUS THE U.N.? WE MAY BE OUTVOTED NOW, BUT VOTING IS ONLY ONE WAY TO MAKE DECISIONS-WE SHOULD TRY OTHERS, FOR THERE IS STILL MUCH IMPORTANT WORK TO BE DONE (By Harlan Cleveland)1 On Nov. 11, 1974, the adult leaders of the Little League, a baseball organization for children 8 to 12, announced that henceforth their World Series would be limited to American teams. They did not say why. But the news item reported, deadpan, that teams from Taiwan and Japan have captured seven of the past eight championships. The incident reflects a mood and raises a question about the capacity of Americans to adjust to a world in which power is diffused, centers of decision are plural—and, even when our national game is played, Americans do not always win. Americans certainly haven't been winning lately. We and our Western European partners have been on the receiving end of more international flak than at any other moment in our history-some of it from people who have been beneficiaries of our bounty, protected by our power and educated in our universities. At a U.N. Special Assembly called last year to consider a "new international economic order," we were accused of wasting energy and minerals, building weapons we don't need, polluting the air and the oceans, eating too much and contributing to the poverty and starvation of others. The U.N.'s "automatic majority"-nearly all the Latins, all the black Africans, the Arabs, the Iranians, the South Asians, most of the Southeast Asians and all the different kinds of Communists-had no difficulty, in a one-country-one-vote assembly, passing resolutions advocating more economic help from those who vote no to those who vote yes. And subsequently, at the General Assembly, the same globe-girdling majority excluded South Africa from its debate, royally received a Palestinian guerrilla leader, and, in the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, excluded Israel from a regional caucus-all actions opposed by the United States. On Dec. 6, the United States Ambassador to the U.N., John Scali, cleared his Government's throat and warned that the U.N. was fading into "the shadow world of rhetoric, abandoning its important role in the real world of negotiation and compromise . . . Support is eroding-in our Congress and among our people. Some of the foremost American champions of this organization are deeply distressed at the trend of recent events." Ten Western Ambassadors spoke in similar vein. "We cannot overlook," said the French delegate, Louis de Guiringaud, "the drawbacks of adopting so many short-lived resolutions each longer than the last, one a repetition of the other-virtually unreadable and sometimes not read, even by their sponsors. No newspaper in the world reproduces them. The United Nations thus runs the risk of living in a closed world." The replies from the non-Western delegations were sharp. Their common theme was that the West had had the votes and had victimized the rest of the world for a generation, and now it was the rest of the world's turn to victimize the West. The West hadn't seen anything wrong with the "tyranny of the majority" when it was used to partition Palestine, to keep Peking out, to bar North Korea from U.N. debates. Huang Hua of China gloated from the sidelines: "The world is progressing amid turbulence. . . peoples want revolution. . . . The present world situation is excellent." Yet many of the replies were also tinged with conciliation: The educated leaders of developing nations do not really believe that resolutions feed people or hasten economic growth. "We here are not a parliament," said Fereydoun Hoveyda, Iran's representative and brother of the Shah's Prime Minister. "Here we have to try to find in common-I stress the words 'in common'-solutions to the world's problems. To form a majority or act as a minority can lead to nothing constructive. A dialogue between the various schools of thought in our assembly must begin. . . . The time for monologues is past." We made this lumpy diplomatic bed ourselves, of course. The Americans and other Westerners who wrote the United Nations Charter were programed by Magna Charta, Montesquieu, Jefferson, the United States Constitution and General Robert's "Rules of Order." Majority rule and parliamentary procedure were 1 Harlan Cleveland, an Assistant Secretary of State and a U.S. Ambassador to NATO in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, is now director of the Aspen Institute' Program in International Affairs at Princeton, N J. |