A Life in Peace and War

"I read this book long before I joined the UN. It came out in 1987 and it’s the autobiography of Brian Urquhart, whose life for the first 40 years of the United Nations was more or less synonymous with that of the organization. He joined it before it really existed, in 1945, as a very young British soldier who had fought through the Second World War. And he was recruited to the team that was setting up the new international organization. So he was there right from the beginning, and he rose to the rank of Under-Secretary-General by the time he left in 1985. He was particularly involved in the creation and running of UN peacekeeping, which was a brilliant improvisation of the 1950s, because peacekeeping is not something that is prescribed in the United Nations Charter at all. He’s a delightful man, he’s now 90, and he’s still very much alive and writing brilliant articles in The New York Review of Books . “The art of making the United Nations work is working out ways of getting governments to co-operate.” But in this book, Brian describes first of all his early life: he was at Westminster School when Ribbentrop, who was then the German ambassador to London, tried to send his son to that school and Brian punched the boy, putting a fairly prompt end to that attempt at Nazi infiltration of a great British institution. He then spent six years in the army – he was a parachutist and was actually involved in the disastrous landing at Arnhem in 1944. Also, at the end of war, in April 1945, he was part of the group that arrived at Bergen-Belsen and saw the horrific sight of the inmates of that camp. So nobody could understand better what the cost of war was, and the importance of finding a different way of managing human affairs. So he had a very strong sense of the raison d’être of the United Nations. But he was also an extremely practical man. He helped to come up with this idea of having lightly armed, neutral, United Nations forces between the combatants as a sort of confidence-building measure when there’s a ceasefire. It started at Sinai in 1956 – it was basically him, with Dag Hammarskjold and Lester Pearson, the then Canadian foreign minister, who invented this and it of course became perhaps the thing the UN is most famous for. But the thing about Brian Urquhart is, he is a very important man, but he is also a delightful man, he has a wonderful sense of humour and the story is really worth reading; it’s extremely funny. There are wonderful episodes – of how he went as still quite a young junior official, with Trygve Lie, the first UN Secretary-General, to Geneva in the early 1950s and the Swiss police came to see him and said: “Do you know that your boss is visiting the cinema with a lady friend incognito?” And, apparently, Trygve Lie was using the pseudonym Rodney Witherspoon as a cover, and the police were worried that for the Secretary-General of the United Nations to be doing this might expose him to blackmail or be compromising in some way. And there’s another wonderful account, much, much later, in 1960, when Brian was in the Congo and he describes being in the office of Patrice Lumumba, the ill-fated Congolese prime minister, just after independence, and there was an office full of telephones, and when the telephone rang, Lumumba was never quite sure which of them it was that was ringing. And he’d rush around picking up one after the other, and saying “A qui ai-je l’honneur?” until his nine-year-old son, who was in the room, pointed to the phone that was actually ringing. And then a bit later, he describes how he went to Katanga, which was a part of the Congo that had seceded under the leadership of a dreadful man called Moise Tshombe, and Brian actually got beaten up by this man’s thugs. But then he was sent for when Tshombe was having a meeting with an American senator, Dodd, (I think the father of the present Senator Dodd) and so he was brought from the police station or prison or wherever he was, and he writes something like: “I had the pleasure of bleeding profusely all over the white leather seats of Tshombe’s Mercedes.” And then he was brought in this bloody state into the presence of Senator Dodd, who was a great supporter of Tshombe, and believed he was a great force for civilization, for holding back communism in Africa – and here was this by then quite senior official of the United Nations, who’d been beaten to a pulp. It must have been a horrible experience at the time, but he makes it sound incredibly funny. So I think almost anybody would enjoy reading this book, and certainly anybody who is starting work at the UN – it should probably be the first book they read, because it both gives you an extremely good idea of why we need the UN and how the UN came to be what it is, and also that it can be fun working for the UN, that it is something worth devoting your life to. What you become aware of – and I think anybody who works for the UN or has anything much to do with it becomes aware of this – is how much it does depend on the member states. The United Nations is essentially an association of governments. And sometimes a brave and brilliant man like Hammarskjold can improvise to some extent, he can work out what governments might be able to live with or agree on, and propose that. But I think a lot of people tend to say: “Why doesn’t the UN do this?”, “Why doesn’t the UN do that?” And the reason is generally very simple: it’s because one of its most powerful members – sometimes it’s Russia, sometimes it’s the United States or China, wouldn’t let it do that. And the way it’s constructed, particularly the fact you have these five permanent members with veto, means that it can’t do it. So the art of making the United Nations work is working out ways of getting governments to co-operate. It’s not about ignoring them and thinking you can do something just on your own, just because it’s the right thing. However nice that might be in theory, it’s never going to work in practice."