Who Are the Racists?

A crowd of delegates and officials spilled over into the press section and public galleries; ambassadors stood three-deep around the horseshoe table. Never had the chamber been so packed, and seldom had its mood been so ugly. The U.N. Security Council was debating the Congo.

In a flurry of indignation, 18 African states, plus Cambodia, Indonesia, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, had called on the Council to condemn Congolese Premier Moise Tshombe and his Western allies for last month's U.S.-Belgian rescue operations at Stanleyville. Tshombe's representatives countered by charging that Algeria, Ghana, Egypt and the Sudan were aiding the rebel "government" of Christophe Gbenye.

It would have been easier to make allowances for the Africans so recently emerged from colonial rule if only they had said even one word in condemnation of rebel savagery. But no. Shrugging off the humanitarian aspect of the paratroop drop, they raged on and on about imperialist intervention. "The white is untouchable," sneered Brazzaville Congo's foreign minister. "A white, especially if his name is Carlson, is worth thousands of blacks." Guinea's representative charged that white mercenaries had "massacred hundreds and hundreds of defenseless Congolese" without a murmur from the West, because "their skins were black like those assassinated in Mississippi."

Painfully Close. That was too much for Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, one of the U.N.'s founding fathers. With quiet force, he told the Council that such talk was "painfully close to that type of racist feeling which has been so heatedly denounced" by the Africans themselves. "There is no such thing as a guilty race," said Spaak. "There have only been misguided men and contemptible men. Hitler was a contemptible man, and I regret to say Gbenye is a contemptible man."

Spaak branded as a lie the charge that the rescuers had discriminated in favor of whites and reported that of the estimated 2,000 evacuated, more than 600 were Congolese and Indians--and evacuation of Congolese had been halted at Leopoldville's own request. The real danger to peace, said Spaak, lay not in the Congo action, but in the radical Africans' "scarcely dissimulated will to separate Africa from Europe and even perhaps to pit the black man against the white."

For the Home Folks. In the General Assembly, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko dutifully echoed the African charges, along with the customary catalogue of Russian threats and promises, including a demand that the U.S. abandon its proposed multilateral nuclear force and an offer of a NATO-Iron Curtain nonaggression pact. The Assembly was still operating under its moratorium on voting--self-imposed to avert a showdown over Russia's peacekeeping arrears. And there was quite an interruption when, to protest the appearance of Castro-Communist Ernesto ("Che") Guevara, a Cuban exile fired a bazooka shell at the U.N. Secretariat building (see THE HEMISPHERE). But nothing could keep the Assembly from pursuing its primary purpose--talk.

Listed to speak were no fewer than two Presidents, three Prime Ministers, three Deputy Prime Ministers and 83 Foreign Ministers. One by one, in speeches as much for the home folks as for the Assembly, they poured out their national hopes and fears, grievances and ambitions. The Philippines laid claim to a large chunk of Malaysia; Argentina demanded that the British give back the Falkland Islands; and Ireland, thumbing its nose at Britain, said the U.N. was "our best hope for the reunification of the Irish nation."

Free Men. The nations praised their own governments, or pointed proudly to their "unique geographic location," or complained about the world market for their products, or decried the spread of nuclear weapons. Israel and four Arab nations accused each other of aggression. Greece accused Turkey of "inhuman conduct" in Cyprus. Laos accused North Viet Nam of armed intervention. Thailand accused Cambodia of "connivance with certain aggressive forces," urged the U.N. to pay more attention to "the problems of regional peace." Said Thai Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman in one of the session's calmest speeches: "We have to live with these problems day and night, and have to devote every ounce of our energy and attention to them, for they have to do with our future life as free men and women, as well as that of the coming generations."

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