Innocuousness Abroad

From time to time, United Nations delegates have complained about New York's crime rate and high cost of living and suggested that the world organization move elsewhere. Last week the Security Council met in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which is a bracing and breathtaking 8,500 ft. above sea level. The experimental session was convened on a tight budget of $106,000 in answer to a request by the U.N.'s 41 African members that the council look into the continent's problems on the spot.

Breaking a longstanding tradition that only U.N. members can address the Security Council, the delegates heard from nine African guerrilla movements variously trying to liberate South Africa, Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea. Given the setting, the delegates were clearly under pressure to produce resolutions favorable to the liberation movements--at the expense of the Western powers. One resolution demanded that Britain scrap its proposed agreement with the government of Rhodesia (TIME, Dec. 6) and call a constitutional conference with African participation to decide that country's future. Britain's ambassador Sir Colin Crowe replied quietly that "my government cannot accept a directive to change its policy while it is being worked out" and cast the sole veto of the session.

The Security Council adopted a more or less moderate version of the expectable anti-apartheid resolution. A phrase, suggested by African delegates, that called upon all states "to deny military cooperation to the South African government" was dropped at the request of Britain, which would otherwise have been forced to break its agreement to help South Africa patrol the region's sea lanes. Even so, France abstained, since the resolution also called for strict observance of a U.N. arms embargo to South Africa, which Paris has chosen to ignore. Half a dozen countries--the U.S. among them--abstained for similar reasons on a resolution that called on all nations to deny arms to Portugal to "continue its repression of the people of the territories under its administration." Washington recently signed an agreement with Lisbon promising it nearly $500 million worth of aid, part of which is in military supplies.

"The last thing that Africa expects from us," said the Sudan's Foreign Minister Mansour Khalid during the session, "is an innocuous resolution that couches the incredible in the unintelligible." The Council did not do that badly, but it did not accomplish very much either. The fact remains that the delegates have passed a total of 128 resolutions on African problems during meetings in New York over the past 26 years. Convening the Security Council in Addis Ababa may have made Africans more aware of the problem of working out an acceptable compromise, but did not make the resolutions any more effective.

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