Conversations with History: Brian Urquhart

e welcome to a conversation on International Affairs I'm Harry Chrysler of The Institute of international studies our distinguished guest today is Sir Brian KET former under Secretary General of the United Nations so Brian is a regent lecturer on the Berkeley campus this semester so Brian welcome to Berkeley great pleasure to be here uh in reading your biography a life in peace and War I was struck by what seemed to be a a remarkably civilized education you had in Britain uh how did that education prepare you for your career in world affairs well I think my education took two parts one at home with my mother who was a school teacher and felt very strongly about International Affairs and the other was at Westminster School in in in London and then at Christ Church Oxford just before World War II and the thing at Westminster was it was a very old extremely eccentric school where there were one or two wonderful teachers the rest weren't so good and you were given a considerable intellectual stimulus but you also given a great deal of Independence to follow up what you were interested in it really was a wonderful place I think accidentally but nonetheless it was a great place to be and from there you went on to Oxford I went to Oxford for two years and then the war started so I joined the army and left and so you're the the the the biggest part of your education it seems was actually as a soldier in World War II yeah well I think if you survived World War III it was the best sort of extended graduate study you could possibly have because you learned how to deal with people and you learn how to deal with your own emotions and you learned a great deal about the way people behave badly most for the most part but sometimes well so it was a wonderful education yeah if you were lucky enough to survive in in your biography there were there are several incidents that stand out and I I thought we might talk a little about them uh uh and then see what you learn from this experience overall I guess you were seriously wounded in a in a parachute jump right well I had a failed parachute yeah which I didn't advise yes and and so you spent some time in a in an Army hospital well I spent about six months in an Army hospital getting over that and then once that was over that that awful experience was over you were uh uh an intelligence officer and you you played an important role role in uh uh the battle the tragedy of arnam uh which is portrayed in the movie uh a bridge not so far tell us a little about that well this was uh I think the most traumatic experience of my life I was the chief intelligence officer of the British Airborne Corp which was the British parachute and glider troops uh having been badly damaged I couldn't do any more parachuting so I became a staff officer uh and the Battle of it was called operation Market Garden it was the largest Airborne operation ever launched in history and I think more aircraft were in the air for that operation at any time before or since uh it it got it was one of those operations which grew bigger and bigger uh as the Ambitions of the general steadily swelled and it was I'm sorry to say I think very largely an indictment of field Marshall Montgomery who is the British uh commander in Europe and let's set this this is after the invasion of Normandy after the invasion of Normandy the Allied troops had taken Paris and they had just taken Brussels and the winter was coming on it was September 1944 and Montgomery wanted to have a glorious coup to end the war in 1944 uh nobody except him I think really believed in this certainly not General Eisenhower and certainly not Eisenhower's staff but the Montgomery was a very very dominating figure and a great pain in the neck when he wanted something that other people didn't want to give him and he went on and on about it the idea was to have a an Airborne operation which would take the three great bridges over the Ry Delta in Holland and land the Allied armies on the other side ready to to preside over the surrender of Germany uh to do this they had one British airborne division two American Airborne divisions the 82nd and the 101st uh and and the whole Allied Air Force but in order to do it they had to stop General Patton who was going great guns in the South because the Montgomery had failed to capture antp so there was only one Supply Port for the entire Allied Expedition re Force which was Sher Borg Miles and Miles Away in France uh which meant they couldn't ship in enough gasoline to run two two mobile operations at the same time so Patton was stopped when there was very little in front of him which I think was a huge mistake and we embarked on on this really very risky Airborne operation my job as Chief intelligence officer was to try to evaluate what the enemy reactions were going to be and how our troops ought to deal with them and I became increasingly alarmed first of all at the German preparations because the Germans had right next to the where the British airborne troops were going to be dropped which was the far end of the operation at arim it was a bridge hence it was across the third Bridge so there were three Bridges to get captured before you got to the British airborne troops and there were intelligence reports that there were two uh SS paner divisions these were the star troops of the German Army the 10th and the ninth SS paner divisions were refitting in this area they had been very badly molded in Normandy these were the best fighting troops in the German Army and they had heavy tanks airborne troops in those days had absolutely nothing they carry their personal weapons and a few Jeeps could be landed by glider but that was about it they had no heavy weapons no supplies very limited supplies of ammunition and they could not fight heavy armor because they didn't have the weapons to do it uh I was also equally upset about the State of Mind of the senior officers in my outfit who were all extremely gung-ho and we're talking about Christmas in Berlin and this kind of thing somebody said they were going to take their golf clubs because it was going to be a pushover and this seemed to me to be extremely dangerous cuz the German Army in fact is not an army to surrender without being told to do it and furthermore these were the best troops in the German arm me I tried to get this point of view across and to point out that this was an extremely risky operation and that if we were going to do it properly we would have to drop the troops in a different place so that they could immediately capture the bridge and that there was a big question as to whether the relieving troops could get up from near Brussels they were stuck on the Albert Canal which was 60 Mi away and the country there is flat Dyke country the roads are all causeways these are perfect roads for an armored Force to stop another force from advancing all you got to do is to disable one tank that blocks the whole thing well I didn't get anywhere of this everybody thought that I was hysterical nervous and so on uh and I finally uh got sent away I think for a remark which turned out to be odly odly prophetic because our general who was a very dashing figure called boy Browning said to Prince Bernard of the Netherlands that the Allied Forces were going to advance into Germany over over a carpet of airborne troops and I said to our chief of staff I wonder if they're going to be alive or dead airborne troops this didn't go well at all so everybody decided then that they'd had enough and I got sent away I asked if I could stay just as an ordinary officer in the operation they said no so I and uh you'll be Court Marshal if you disobey orders and everybody had enough trouble by that time so I went well the thing went very seriously wrong um and I then realized what I hadn't realized before that these generals and great commanders and politicians who one so admired during the war were actually just like everybody else they were vain they were ambitious they very often made extremely faulty judgments I had not thought of that before I had always thought they were kind of super people and I must say that it remained me with be for the rest of my life I've never really trusted uh very well-known sort of glamorous leaders to to Really resist vanity and ambition and make the right mature decision and get it right another experience that stands out toward the end of the war you were uh in the first waves of troops that opened up the concentration camps uh uh recollect for us what that experience was like actually well I left the Airborne business naturally after Battle of irim because I was pretty unpopular that if you want to get really I mean it's very unpopular to be the one person who opposes something that everybody else wants to do but if you turn out to be right you get seriously unpopular and I was seriously unpopular because I was right so I asked to be transferred and I had a armored car Squadron which was supposed to move slightly ahead of the Allied advance and pick up German scientists and industrialists and secret formulas and papers and things like that it was an intelligence operation uh for some unknown reason the British thought that the German scientists would all want to go to uh to Japan to continue the war every German scientist I met wanted to come to Berkeley California because they all knew about the Lawrence labor was the only place they wanted to go Berkeley California was their idea of heaven and so it was a slightly odd Mission anyway uh we were quite far ahead and we got to the bson Concentration Camp which was a very large one more or less by mistake cuz we didn't get the radio message telling all the troops to stop the reason for stopping all the troops was that uh places like bson had an enormous Camp population with virtually every known contagious disease known to man they were appalling and the the authorities I think rightly were very worried that if the troops arrived and let them out you would suddenly get a series of epidemics not only just among the Germans but among the Army as well which would be devastating so that the idea we didn't get the message so we arrived there I had never it seems incredible now but none of us knew about concentration camps I mean I knew about the persecution of the Jews but I had no idea that it had got to this unbelievable really insane point and the first thing I read to you about bson was we were driving along a little country road and there was a big high fence in the distance on a corner in the road which with what appeared to be logs stacked inside it and as we got era it suddenly became clear to me that these were not logs these were human corpses there were something like I think 15 or 20,000 unburied corpses at belon and so we drove to the gate and uh I then realized that we had no idea what to do about this except to be we were past anger because it was a terrible spectacle of total deliberate human humiliation uh it was terrible and most of the people were scarcely alive I mean they were what you see in the pictures they were skeletons uh so I went inside the camp with my driver who is a resourceful person to see if he could find anyone in the camp who seemed to have any control of anything because the guards had all left it was too bad they hadn't been into the camp for something like 6 weeks and we did finally find two doctors from Vienna who had done a most amazing job of taking the camp children and segregating them in one corner of the camp and every anything there was to eat or water was given to these children so that they had been preserved and they told us a little bit about it they also told us about the various diseases they had they had virtually everything from measles to dentry to typhus to typhoid it was it was a very and people were dying at the rate of about 500 a day well if you have 20 soldiers in armed cars there's very little you can do about that so I sent a lot of messages home uh to the headquarters saying what had happened they knew all about it already and then we said to the Jewish doctors um who's the commant of this Camp oh they said uh he's still here he's in the SS Barracks which are outside the camp so we went down there and there was this person who was sub to became very famous with the Beast of bson he was called Ober struman F Kramer he really was something else because I went down to arrest him and he began a long thing about about how an OB St ban fur which is a a full Colonel more or less could not be uh could not surrender to a junior officer I was there a major and my my driver said I think we better shoot him don't you I said no I don't be will do that so we locked him up in a meet in a meat locker there hadn't been any electricity in this part of Germany for some time because we didn't have enough troops to guide him he was very angry and then we went and we tried to do what we could to with these with the doctors to see if there's anything we could do very little and then we waited for the convoys of ambulances and doctors and so on to arrive and with them arrived the next day the the British General in that area who was called General sban horx who was a Cavalry General was a very dashing figure and he said uh well you better show me around the camp where's the com British generals always ask that question they said where's the senior officer they always ask that question so I oh the senior officer my goodness well we locked him up in a meat locker so I sent someone off to get the get Kramer and for some unknown reason the electricity had come on during the night which it hadn't happened for weeks and old Kramer was extremely cold and very silly and he took the general r on kind of it was amazing he he he was like a tour guide said you know this is the execution place and uh this used to be the kitchens but they hasn't been any food for 6 weeks he quite proud of it and he got was it was but what was interesting about that that experience was first of all we didn't know anything about it and secondly the effect it had on the soldiers who had always British soldiers are very friendly and they sort of even like their enemies up to a point and they always called the Germans old Jerry or brother Bosch or something like that they never did that after bson they became absolutely stone-faced when they were dealing with the Germans it was it was an unbelievable eye opener and I cannot imagine why we hadn't been told about it do you think that these wartime experiences the horror of that or the devastation uh was an important impulse in in in saying well we must have an international organization that can deal well I think it was for a great number of people and for a great number of leaders I mean particularly Roosevelt and Churchill no question I mean Roosevelt and Churchill is important to remember were the Great supporters and inventors of the United Nations and uh and Roosevelt was the was the person who actually was his brainchild and for people like me it certain it was I mean if you saw if You' seen what human beings can actually do to each other during a war and the incredible destructiveness of modern weapons and the total ruin of whole continents I mean Europe was just a ruin uh and the debasement of all the things that are best in human beings in war including in the good guys I mean you know we did things in the war which you can't conceive of now simply because that was the only way to win and naturally I think I mean I felt particularly after the the bson experience I I felt extremely strongly that Human Rights was something which simply had to be developed into an international rule it simply wasn't good enough to try to rely on people to behave reasonably well they don't I mean the Germans were were in extreme but they're not they weren't unique there there was an excitement a can do quality uh making things up as you go along in in these various committees that you were involved in well it was it was it was really the most if you came home from six years in the in the war and immediately as I was very lucky to do got into the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations which was meeting in London uh it was and met all these people who had invented the organization uh who had written the charter who really believed it could be done who thought that things were going to change totally for the better particularly the Americans and you met also all these people from from the from European countries most of whom have been in the resistance all the war and you suddenly had a feeling that you're the sun had come out and and you know people were very optimistic unlike now where there hasn't been a war for World War for 50 years when people are as pessimistic as hell in 1945 people were extremely optimistic they really believed that the war had been such a terrible lesson that we would never make these mistakes again and that the UN was the way out of it and I must say I believed it up to a point though I did not believe that uh that that that the behavior of governments would so radically change that they would actually make the charter work it seemed to me to be very unlikely you you wrote that uh uh the UN like San Francisco where it was founded was built on a great fault line explain what you meant by that well it was built on a on a on a on a on a ideological political fault line of of the of the Clash of ideologies between market capitalism and Marxism uh you had the Soviet Union which was a great power and the Soviet block which was Eastern Europe with China as a kind of a question mark because China wasn't represented in the UN at that time I it was represented by Taiwan which was then called Formosa but uh uh there was this ideological split which made it extremely difficult to make the thing work because after all unfortunately both sides in the ideological split had the veto so they could stop anything and they did particularly the Russians the the the West had an automatic majority in the the UN for some 20 years and so you didn't have to worry too much about the vitao but the Russians were in a minority they were in a state of great inferiority feelings about the United States the United States had the had the nuclear bomb they didn't the United States was providing all this Aid to rescue Russia from the damage of the war and indeed everyone else come to that I mean this was this was the great period I think I think the greatest period of statesmanship of any country in the history of the world because the United States was unquestionably the most powerful richest country and you're talking about what years now from I'm talking RAR from 44 through 1950 MH uh and yet they didn't seek to gain an Empire or any particular Advantage they worked in the UN to make it work they set up the UN relief and re Rehabilitation Administration which is the greatest to this day the greatest relief operation ever launched it it it put the world on its feet run by Governor Herbert Leman of New York it was the most extraordinary operation it it simply picked up countries including the Soviet Union and China and put them on the road again and you never hear about it for some reason but this was an American idea it was and then of course a little later on we had things like the Marshall Plan which rescued certainly rescued Western Europe from becoming communist was a tremendously farsighted plan and all of these and the whole un system which was a very far-sighted the Britain Woods institutions the bank and the fund uh the UN itself the specialized agencies the National court of justice this was a great blueprint for a better future and it was it was really American ideals that very much so I mean what is what is so surprising to me looking back on it in 1945 is that the world with the exception of the Soviet Union joyfully accepted the imposition of American ideals as a world system they they they people were tremendously enthusiastic for it and I think that says a lot about American leadership it just was something and then you had these extraordinary episodes which I don't think are thought of enough now I mean Elena Roosevelt's Crusade for human rights which resulted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the UN adopted in 1948 which I think has will will be seen as one of the most important actions in the whole 20th century because it completely changed the perception of human society from being a society where governments were dominant to a society where the where the individual rights uh were the thing that everybody including governments had to worry about you you were there and and and watched Elanor Roosevelt at work in how would you characterize well you know it she was I had a huge admiration for her and I had quite a lot to do with her actually and she was a remarkable an absolutely unique person I don't think there's ever been any anyone else like her and the state department like foreign officers usually get things wrong and they were very worried that Mrs Roosevelt wouldn't be tough enough to deal with the Russians represented by Andre vishinsky the great prosecutor on this whole thing of getting the Declaration of Human Rights accepted by the assembly I never did they make a greater mistake she was absolutely amazing because she kept right at it uh she was after all the Widow of the great president of the United States so it was very difficult for the Russians to dismiss her at any level and then she would go after vinski in this sort of almost motherly way you she get totally fed up with all this Soviet boilerplate and vinsky was saying you know this is outrageous you can't infringe the rights of governments they are the things that matter and and she would turn on him in this sort of rather kindly way and say Mr vishinsky we're not dealing here with the rights of governments they're far too much already we are dealing here Mr vishinsky with the rights of people of men of the right of man to be free that is the point and vishinsky would look absolutely goggle eyed at this and would not be able for once to think of anything to say and she was extraordinary I mean and she got it through I don't know how she did it she was an amazing woman AB I think it was an ex extremely important milestone in human civility I mean it really and it I mean haven't got there yet but it's made an extraordinary difference to the way to way which people behave now another American that you observed and worked under and who made quite an impact was Ralph Bunch tell us a little about him well Ralph bunch I suppose is the greatest friend I ever had in my life and also my mentor for all the years I was in the un uh he was an absolutely extraordinary person and again somebody who's been seems to me shamefully forgotten uh Ralph was a was an African-American he was born in Detroit he lost his parents when he was 11 years old and he went and lived in what is now watts in Los Angeles with his grandmother who was illiterate but was a person who believed that especially for black Americans education was the only way to go and she insisted on Bunch not only finishing high school but also going to UCLA she insisted on him studying instead of the usual things that that black Americans studied in those days accounting and that kind of thing she insisted on studying political science and he went on to become a a really immensely successful academic figure uh he was very early on struck with the the parallel between the the race problem in the United States and the problem of colonialism in the World At Large where you had an enormous proportion of the population subjected completely against their will to to the Caprices of of of of the white population so he began very early on to study both these things he was a very important figure in the early part of the Civil Rights Movement he founded the national negro Congress in 1936 which was the first attempt to have across the board all class uh negro representative body unfortunately it got taken over by the Communist party later on and he denounced it but but it was an interesting eff he wrote a great deal of the early literature in including a a book called A worldview of race in 1936 which again which made this parallel of studying colonialism and the origins of racism in the United States and finding trying to detect the under underlying motivations for each they were very important works at the time and he then went he then became he did up a major study of colonialism in Africa which was quite an unusual subject in those days mhm and he also began a major study of the non-white population of South Africa and he was in 6 months in South Africa doing that but then he was put on to be the chief assistant to gunam mural who was the Swedish um sort of social Economist who uh was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to write a book on the race problem in the United States this book was an American dilemma which is I think still a sort of again a kind of landmark in the in the writing about this subject and and this would have been during the war no they started in 1938 I see and that absorbed Bunch was his research director and actually wrote the first draft of a very large part of the book I mean he was a he he was a person of great intellectual ability bunch he had the most extraordinary analytical mind and was capable of working indefinite hours uh if he thought it was important and he really I think made it possible for M to write this absolutely groundbreaking book which came out in 1944 finally but by that time Bunch had uh Bunch was obsessed with the with with with Hitler he had actually read mine camp and believed that it wasn't just the Jews who were threatened racely by Hitler but particularly all black people who Hitler didn't even regard as human and he spent a great deal of time trying to arouse black Consciousness in this country of the enormous threat because the Communist party at that time was saying that this was just a white man's War and it was nothing to do with ethnic minorities of any kind and that blacks would be very wise to stay out of it and refuse to serve in the Army Bunch was radically opposed to this View and since he'd actually read the literature and he and then he joined the the OSS he was that principal African expert and finally went into the state department in the last years of the war into the section which was Was preparing for the San Francisco Conference and writing the charter and he wrote two chapters of the ch the chapters 11 and 12 which are the chapters on non- self-governing territories and trustees ship which I don't think anybody else can claim to have done he was a very remarkable person then he came to the UN first of all to set up the trustees ship department and he had a great deal to do with the mov Mo movement for decolonization he was the kind of Dynamo of that movement because he knew more about it than anybody else did including most the European Colonial experts so he was very important then he was sidetracked again he got sent to Palestine in 1947 with the commission of the UN which was supposed to decide upon what was going to be done about Palestine when the British left this was a kind of a Marx Brothers commission it was the most amazing collection of people Bunch said it was the worst group of people he'd ever had to work with and I think he was absolutely right and he ended up writing both the majority and The Minority Report of that Commission because none of the members were capable of writing anything so he wrote both MH uh and he said he was a ghost riding hot because he' managed to take both points of view and make them perfectly reasonable which he did and of course the the partition route was taken by the general assembly and he ultimately won the Nobel Prize for well that was in the next stage because then the the the moment the British left uh the Israelis declared statehood and five Arab countries invaded Israel this was in May 1948 and the security Council of the UN appointed a mediator first of all to try to get the war stopped and secondly to negotiate a settlement of the Palestine problem we all thought in those days idiots that we were that you know nothing there wasn't anything a bit of good negotiation couldn't solve and Bernard do uh what asked for Bunch as his sort of right-and man Bernard had never been to the Middle East he didn't know anything about it so Bunch went with Bernard do and was the person who really did all the leg work and they got a truce in the war they set up the first peacekeeping operation which was the to monitor that truce and then they set about trying to negotiate a settlement which instantly needless to say raised tremendous uh ill feelings on all sides both Arab and Israeli bodot was assassinated by the stern gang in Jerusalem in in September 1948 and bunch took over from him became the mediator actually he he should have been uh killed with bernot that was the the intention but fortunately he had an English secretary and the Israelis at those point that point rightly were very suspicious of the British and they held her up at the at the mandle B gate in Jerusalem and bunch refused to leave her and so they were 25 minutes late for the rondevo with bernot and bernot went off with one of the French observers who was killed with him so a bunch was miraculously didn't get killed and then he he took the whole thing on he didn't get any further with the settlement uh business but he also recommended to the general assembly that there had to be some serious legal basis for peace in the Middle East even if it wasn't a settlement you had to have an Armistice which everybody had signed which gave legal obligations to both sides uh nobody wanted to have anything to do with this because they thought it was completely impossible so Bunch got stuck with being the mediator to negotiated and he did that on the island of roads in the Mediterranean in early 1949 everybody thought it was impossible but he actually did it and uh was I think quite rightly regarded as what he had always been a negotiator of incredible skill but the great thing about Bunch was that uh everybody who dealt with him even when you disagreed with Bunch uh you knew he was absolutely fair and honest he never would tell anyone something that wasn't true and he understood I think better than anybody I've ever seen the the sort of concerns and fears and worries that are on the minds of people in Conflict so that he could come up with ideas which would suddenly meet all of the fears these people hadn't been willing to express in public and the result was he he enjoyed the most astonishing Confidence from the people he dealt with and I think if anybody ever deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he did actually typically a bunch when he was told he had been awarded the Peace Prize he wrote a letter to the committee saying that he was terribly sorry he deeply appreciated all this but he couldn't accept it because he was in the UN Secretariat and you didn't work in the secretari to win prizes he was only doing his job well nobody had ever done that before so the Nobel committee got very upset they were Norwegian and they got hold of the then Secretary General trick V Le who was also Norwegian and said look this is absolutely terrible this is a terrible blow to the Nobel Foundation what are we going to do and Lee then ordered MCH to accept the prize said you have to do even if you I wanted for the good of the organization so that's it now this uh the Palestine Israel settlement was really the the first successful effort at peacekeeping right for uh for the UN or well it wasn't a settlement it was an arms disc the first peacekeeping well there were two actually these were these were these were military Observer missions to Monitor and maintain a truce and there was one in Palestine between Israel and the armies of Lebanon Syria Jordan and Egypt mhm which were all on the borders and then there was another one at the same time on the ceasefire line in Kashmir between India and Pakistan which a war was a war that had happened Sim simultaneously so we had two military Observer operations and bunch really wrote the principles and the sort of rules on which these would be conducted one of the things he insisted on which is very typical well there were two things he most insisted on one was that The Observers must never fail either side they must be absolutely impartial no matter what their personal feelings were and in fact if they began to get too too popular in the newspapers on one sat they used to get the most tremendous Blast from Bunch saying what's all this about being so popular what are you doing this is not at all the point being popular is not the point being fair is the point the other thing was he insisted on them being unarmed that soldiers always want to be armed they love it and these were officers and they all wanted to carry pistols and bunch said no you can't do that because if you carry a pistol you're identified as a military man with a capacity to shoot and that is very unsafe for you and very bad for the mission you have to be you have to be unarmed it may be risky but you do it and that's been the rule ever since and he wrote the the whole basic principles of this of peacekeeping in in in those operations and and peacekeeping became uh in a sense a major portfolio for you right I mean well we had these two Observer missions and then in 1956 during the Su crisis military observers weren't enough I mean you had the armies of Britain and France in Egypt you had the Israelis in Egypt there were three armies to be got out and in order to do that you had to have a sort of buffer zone between them and the Egyptians otherwise you would simply Carry On the War by other means so it wasn't any sense so then we put in the first actual peacekeeping Force which was which was armed basically and they were they had light arms they had personal weapons so they're not allowed to use Force either except in in in in self-defense they're not allowed to use force and uh and bunch was the was the great architect of that he was the person who who put that together and and really did the leg work it was and it had never been done before so that we had everything we had to invent everything including the headgear and the the rules and everything and it it was actually the Congo operation in in the next the beginning of the next decade where uh the UN role became even more complicated well the Congo really was a kind of rehearsal for these huge operations the UN does today like Cambodia or Bosnia or Somalia where it isn't just peacekeepers keeping two national armies apart but it's trying to deal with a country that's completely broken down within the boundaries of that country and dealing with all sorts of armed factions and nonsense of this kind and trying to keep the civilian structure going the public administration and so in this crisis we should remind the audience occurred when the Congo was declared independent what happened was there was a great Avalanche of decolonization in Africa in in the late 50s uh started by the British carried on by the French and the belgians panicked they had never thought of theong the Congo was the rich easily the richest colony in Africa uh and the belgians had sort of never thought of leaving until they suddenly realized the French were all leaving and they gave Independence to the Congo at about 6 months notice in 1960 without any preparation at all believing completely wrongly that they would stay on and run it just as they'd always done it was technologically a very complicated country of the Congo because it had huge mining interests huge uh a very comp licated transport system River Road and air it had great agricultural parts and so it was tribally extremely complicated there were about 200 tribes so you had a civil war and and what happened was that the the the we had the Independence Day with the king of the belgians making I think an ill-advised speech about the honorable record of his ancestors which wasn't so hot actually and this infuriated Patrice lumba who was the totally untried Prime new prime minister and uh the then of course nothing happened because the belgians didn't move uh there were still no congales officers in the Army nobody was doing it all well and the Army mutinied against the Belgian officers or the entire officer cor and really threw them out MH and the belgians I think understandably panicked and sent in a whole bunch of parachute troops to recapture the airport in leopoldville and various various times throughout the Congo and they got into a sort of knockdown drag out fight with the congales Army which was more less unofficed but still pretty pretty rough and lumumba appealed first of all to General Eisenhower to send the Marines Eisenhower rather neatly dodged that one and said I want to go to New York to the UN that's the place to ask and he appealed to the UN for help and Hammer took this to the security Council and it wasn't supposed at that point to be a military intervention it was supposed to be a kind of humanitarian operation but it very soon Bunch was in leopoldville where he'd been for the independence ceremonies and stayed on because he thought it was all going to go wrong and he said you know we have to put soldiers in here we need a great number of soldiers now before a great number of people have been killed because the moment a lot of people been killed it'll be impossible to control this thing we flew in 3,000 soldiers in 3 days and another 10,000 in 2 weeks which we were all very proud of and they simply arrived I mean they just arrived and uh sort of got between people who were likely to be be killing each other making it up as you went along and we had to make it up well none of us knew where it was I mean I would I went there 3 hours notice the day the thing was decided on and I was under the impression that the Congo was on the Indian Ocean I'd never been to Africa before except for North Africa during the war and I was much surprised when I got to leop Ville to discover that it was on the Atlantic I mean that's how prepared we were but we had to make it up as we went along and for some time for about two months it was an extraordinary success we did manage to get the thing quieted down we got the belgians out we managed to get the government going again uh we started training all the people who had to be trained in the public sector we started training the Army mhm but then unfortunately the thing 3 weeks 3 months later the thing broke on Cold War lines because the patri lumba was the Prime Minister was a Firebrand and a great demagogue and an extremely capricious and volatile figure I mean you never could tell what he was going to do next and the president who was a rather sort of calm figure president kasav vuu suddenly dismissed the Prime Minister actually for a very good reason because LBA had sent the Army into one of the secessionist provinces and they started killing and all SS of people and then Luma on the same radio station dismissed the president and then real Civil War and then the Soviet Union back Rumba and the United States back hubu so you had a Civ Civil War on which was superimposed the Cold War in the outside world and that was a nightmare and we and we kept going for four years but it was it it was very very difficult and at a crucial point in in this operation you almost lost your life uh correct yeah well I I was sent down to there were three provinces of the old Bel Congo which seceded from the central government was of which the most important one was katanga because it was where the richest mines were and uh one of the one of the reason there was no way you could get the Congo sort of quieted down as long as katanga had seceded because the central government would never admit that this had happened and also it was very important financially to the central government it was where most of the money came from so they were always mounting totally incompetent Expeditions which caused Great losses of life and uh and and were not really settled to anything as long as this was not settled I was the sent to be the UN representative in katanga which was I must say not a post that I would have actually asked for if I'd been consulted but there was and um the first night I was there there I was kidnapped ironically enough from a dinner party in honor of Senator Thomas DOD of Connecticut the father of the present one who was the secessionist leader tr's greatest advocate in the United States and a real pain in the neck in my view uh and uh suddenly in the just as this dinner was about to start the all these thugs came roaring in and kidnapped me and my colleague George Ivan Smith and that was I must say quite interesting really it was very rough I have to say but then I you were beat up I was very badly beaten up but I finally was got out because the we had in those days an Indian Brigade in Kanga and the colonel of the gerka regiment said to president chombe either you get our boss Mr ER back or my troops will blow up the presidential Palace so you have and you have four hours that's it so poor trom came out in his car and was searching the countryside and he finally got me out but um it was a but it was a very violent place extremely violent and the Congo was the place where uh uh dog Hammer show uh died in a in a plane crash tell us a little about him he was an extraordinary uh well ham I think was the most extraordinary person I ever met in public life with the possible exception of Ralph Bunch but ham was very spectacular because he was a he was an intellectual in action and Well on his way to being a kind of secular Saint as well I mean he was a person of very complicated very dedicated character he became increasingly a Mystic in later years he was I must say intellectually the most able person I have ever seen in my life there was no problem in any discipline of the human mind which hammerel couldn't Master with some ease even Nuclear Physics when we took to getting into the peaceful uses of atomic energy to everybody's intense amazement Hamel turned out to be able to discuss problems of nuclear physics uh with people like Professor I rabi and zacharov and people like that nobody would he was an extraordinary person but the great thing about him was that he had a sense of mission and he believed that uh that the charter was really a sacred document and that the whole point was to move it forward so it actually became something stronger than than it was at the time uh and he really developed he developed an extraordinary respect for the UN worldwide I mean it was interesting because hammerel was a very shy uh extremely awkward person in human relations he didn't I think he didn't like close relations with people he was a bachelor uh and he really was he like he his his private life was totally private he was he was a great loner mhm uh and he was an aristocrat an intellectual of intellectuals but you could go to downtown Ciro or Rio de Janeiro or Beijing and the people the taxi drivers and people in the street would have heard of him and actually would have quite a reasonable idea of what he was trying to do nobody else has ever managed to do that in that job he had Charisma in other words and uh and he and he really was extraordinary and of course he was the person who made the UN an active peace operation rather than just this diplomatic bureaucratic outfit which we had been and he was the person who developed peacekeeping and really became a very active presence in as a negotiator of really diff ult problems looking back at at your career your work at the UN and and these personalities uh you've known and and let's focus on peacekeeping a minute when do you think the what are the circumstances under which the UN can do peacekeeping well well I think you know that peacekeeping was very useful uh in the Cold War during the post decolonization period because you had after decolonization you had all sorts of power vacuums all over the world I mean the Middle East Cyprus Kashmir whole parts of Africa and so on and if you had the cold war going on uh nature aboring a vacuum it seemed likely that either the United States or the Soviet Union would try to fill those vacuums and if they both tried simultaneously like they they did in the Congo you would have a really incredibly dangerous situation and so peacekeeping was a vacuum filler and it also gave the pretext to sensible governments who were fighting other to stop it I mean to the Israelis and the Arabs for example who didn't there was no percentage in them fighting each other because the Arabs couldn't win and the Israelis would lose a great deal without losing the battle and I think that was extremely valuable or India and Pakistan for example who had no means either of them of winning the battle over Kashmir but occasionally got into a war over it I three times so I think that was very useful and of course the other very useful thing about peacekeeping in those days was that that it kept Regional conflicts out of the East West nuclear confrontation so that instead of either the United States or the Soviet Union rushing into to the Middle East or Cyprus or somewhere they would vote in the security Council to put in a un operation and then they would both feel free to criticize it it was fine and it was I think probably a much more valuable technique than anybody thought but the trouble with peacekeeping was it depends on governmental consent including the consent of the governments whose country you're in and if they don't want it it doesn't work because it's lightly armed and extremely small these operations we learned that the hard way when NASA expelled the peacekeeping force in 1967 this was 1,200 soldiers on a 300 mile front the way the Western press was going on you have thought it was NATO I they said where they should have fought the Egyptian dictator NASA had 150,000 troops with tanks in the sa we had 1300 with small personal arms it was nonsense but uh this is where valuable I think after the Cold War uh two things vastly confused the so-called International Community which is the UN the particularly the governments the first one was Desert Storm which was a huge success of the use of preeminent Force particularly on the television I mean it looked terrific and people began to think ah now that the UN is United once more it can do anything by force uh I think also that they weren't used to the security Council agreeing on everything after the the demise of the Soviet Union there was almost no problem the security Council couldn't agree on and they forgot that it's one thing to agree on a solution to a problem it's quite another thing to put it into effect and the third thing was that what they were getting into weren't these conflicts between nation states they were internal conflicts within the boundaries of states or in the case of somal or a failed state or Yugoslavia and these were ethnic and sometimes religious wars there weren't governments fighting them they were local leaders not governments so they didn't have much use for the UN they would they didn't obey the rules they all believed they could win and they were very difficult to control and then they put peacekeeping operations into these places I think I was one of the people who constantly said you can't do that but you know they put a peacekeeping operation into former Yugoslavia into Croatia and Bosnia because because nobody none of the Europeans and certainly not the United States wanted to go in and fight the serbs they just didn't want to do it so it was a neat idea to have this kind of figleaf operation of the UN which was bound to fail a peacekeeping operation which everybody could then blame for not fighting the serbs that that wasn't what they told it to do in the first place it was supposed to be impartial and I think that was a that's been very expensive for the UN and the idea that force is easy to use in somebody else's country is nonsense I mean the I think one of the greatest mistakes under United States leadership that was made was the idea to pursue General ided in Somalia General ided was a local leader with a considerable following and the moment foreigners began to fight him the Somalia United even if they' had been fighting him the day before to fight with him against the Foreigner and you know they should have known that they didn't so I think there was a misconception uh that peacekeeping peacekeeping could be used in these very violent civil situations uh because it had been so effective before and I think what they've got to do is to is to devise a new technique now an instant deployment antiviolence very highly trained group of people who can be flown into these places immediately and really put down the violence before it escalates into something that nobody can control nobody did that in Bosnia nobody did it in Somalia nobody did it in Rwanda I they took four months to get soldiers back into Rwanda it was outrageous and I I I think you have to have something between peacekeeping and Desert Storm which will not be a a military operation or a peacekeeping operation it will be a sort of police antiviolence operation done by highly qualified people civilians and police and soldiers but at the moment there's there's no why do you think there's been such a turnaround on on us attitudes toward the UN you you were just suggesting that that uh in many ways in this new environment that the UN has become a Whipping Boy that's probably especially true in the United States well I think it is especially true in the United States and I must say I I deeply regret it because the United States invented this organization is its most important member and incidentally the only country which actually makes money out of the UN concentrated the general Leaf because the UN is in the United States and puts in an enormous amount of stuff much more than the US pays but never mind doesn't matter I think it started you know Desert Storm was fine and the George Bush's New World Order and all that uh and it all looked as if it was going to be easy and then it became clear that some of these operations they undertaken weren't easy we going to cost lives and uh might even end in failure and we're going to take a great deal of resources and have to last for many years I suppose the real Turning Point uh was the disaster with the Rangers in maradu in Somalia when 18 Rangers were killed and four helicopters were shot down this was an operation undertaken by the special Special Forces command in Tampa Florida without apparently telling the UN command in Mishu but in Washington it was always believed to have been an operation under the UN because it was easier to blame the UN and I think at the moment you had that shot of the helicopter the ranger helicopter pilot being dragged through the streets by an infuriated mall I a great number of Somali were killed in that episode incidentally so they had something to be quite annoyed about but still it was terrible I think that really put the Hat on you on United States sort of active support and participation in these things even though they hadn't been under un command and in fact would have been alive probably if they had been because the General in maradu knew exactly what he was doing and I think the other thing of course was the had nothing to do with the UN is the kind of ideological turnaround in this country the anti-government movement I mean if you're anti-government the UN is 185 governments you can be 185 times as vitrio I mean uh I think that there has been an ideological turnaround towards a sort of xenophobic isolationism which you see exemplified in Somebody Like Pat Buchanan but it's not uncommon very common among among congressmen in Washington the knew a lot particularly there's a huge amount of Mythology about the UN I mean the mythology about the UN is absolutely breathtaking people believe it costs a great deal of money to the United States completely untrue it doesn't the United States makes a net gain people believe it's World Government well Dream On and the UN is a pathetically weak organization which improvises in emergencies to try to prevent the worst from happening you know I think until one cuts through that that ideological fog it's going to be difficult to to restore the kind of support the UN had and the UN has a lot of things to do too I mean it's it needs a great deal of administrative reform it needs much better leadership it needs much better management it needs to have a better civil service and so on but these things can be done what advice would you give uh young people who were starting out and and who might wish to pursue a a career in diplomacy and peace well I don't know the only thing to do is look at it subjectively if I was young I don't think I would necessarily want to go into the Foreign Service of the country I belong to because I think diplomats and diplomacy are to some extent a thing of the past because after all with modern Communications their main functions are not really totally necessary they become sort of Hotel Keepers and public relations people to some extent so I wouldn't do that that that's probably less true of the United States Foreign Service than any other but but even even there the UN for the moment is has a hiring freeze and is likely to have one for a long time the bureaucracy is in very bad shape because it's been totally Paralyzed by all these Cuts uh it's not a happy ship I think it's indifferently LED myself but I suppose that will change I mean and and there are some fascinating jobs in the UN I think there that a place to learn about this kind of thing uh would be in some of the field operations I mean working for the High Commissioner for refugees for something something like that which is a very tough extremely exciting Hands-On job in Desperate circumstances you learn more about human beings and organization and even about governments and politics that sort of thing than you learn sitting in an office there are a lot of very good non-governmental organizations engaged in the same kind of thing some of whom do terrific work and and uh you know there the whole humanitarian relief group CARE Oxfam save the children and so on then there are the Human Rights group of organizations Amnesty International Human Rights Watch these are fascinating organizations to work in there are wonderful environmental organizations the UN has a big environmental program again it's kind of styed at the minute by all the cost cutting and everything but it will come around again I think in our we have a minute minute minute or so left I am left after reading your biography and hearing you speak uh here and and on the campus that that that Brian KET in the end is a pragmatic Optimist is that correct yes I would say that's right I I would say I was a pragmatic Optimist and uh uh an idealistic realist I don't think I think idealism is the only form of realism Because unless you you're idealistic to some extent you don't have anything to look forward to you don't have anywhere to go and I and I think there's no point in being pessimistic I mean after all we're only on this world once as far as we know we might as well make the best of it and also I think that there are we've learned a great deal there are tremendous opportunities in The Next Century there are also tremendous possibilities for disaster and the great thing to do is to work in some field where you'll make sure that the opportunities are realized and the disasters are minimized and that's what really I think the international service and indeed a lot of national service is all about so Brian thank you very much for for being with us here today and thank you for spending a month uh on the campus we we hope to have you back again sometime soon well thank you it's been an enormous pleasure for me thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation on International affairs a e

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 10,611

Keywords: United, Nations, general, secretary, soldier, government, history

Id: dfuJ4W-wqI4

Length: 58min 16sec (3496 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2008