| The Harvard Salient | November 4, 1996 |
nited Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali may find himself out of a job soon, if President Clinton or Bob Dole has anything to say about it. Perhaps Dr. Boutros-Ghali, in his reluctance to step down from his position, has decided to use some good ol' Western-style electioneering to rebuild his popularity in the country that pays the bulk of his salary. It was clear from his speech at the Institute of Politics on October 24 that he has been following this year's election closely. When choosing an audience, the best politicians aim for what a Pizza and Politics panelist recently called "the mushy middle." Boutros-Ghali's horribly bland and totally uninspiring speech was, appropriately, delivered to the most enthusiastically mushy of Harvard's "mushy middle."
The policies of the United Nations are often regarded in the United States
with universal indifference because they are viewed as either ineffective
or irrelevant. The United Nations has a very limited range of issues on
which its voice is or should be taken seriously. Boutros-Ghali, to his credit,
chose to speak on one of them: "Stemming the Tide of International
Terrorism." Certainly, of all of the issues facing the world, this
is one that deserves cooperative international attention if not multilateral
action. The difficulties of preventing arms trade over borders, extraditing
convicted and suspected terrorists from countries where they seek refuge,
finding and destroying international training sites for terrorists and cutting
off funding for terrorist organizations from extra-national sources cry
out for international collaboration.
The horrible terrorist attacks of the last few decades have left many governments wringing their hands in frustration. Boutros-Ghali and his colleagues finally have an issue before them on which their views and policies might actually be taken seriously. In his speech, the Secretary-General correctly identified the problems of a unilateral approach to fighting terrorism, but he utterly failed to make any policy suggestions. In fact, there was not a single novel, let alone contentious statement in the Secretary-General's half-hour speech.
He began by explaining that, "Terrorism has touched my life." Like any good candidate presenting a case to the American people, he would like his audience to understand that this issue has personal as well as professional significance to him. Both his family and his homeland have been plagued by terrorism. "President [Anwar] Sadat," he explained, "was assassinated by terrorists, and I have to live with this threat." One would think, however, that in the fifteen years since Sadat's death the Secretary-General might have come to some more interesting conclusions than these: "[Terrorists] seek to intimidate the population. They seek to destroy the tourist industry. They care nothing for the innocent lives they destroy." Heads were nodding vigorously as Boutros-Ghali explained the mystery of terrorist psychology to his Harvard audience.
Having supplied a trivial analysis of terrorist attacks, Boutros-Ghali made a convincing case for international participation as the basis for a solution. Unfortunately, though, he left his audience fairly unsatisfied, as he failed to make a single concrete policy recommendation (and perhaps demonstrated that he has been watching some choice clips of our presidential debates). Out of his magical hat of peace, Boutros-Ghali pulled the all-encompassing, never-offending solution of paper generation. "At present, eleven international conventions that address crimes associated with terrorism have been deposited with the United Nations. Each deals with a specific part of the fight to stop terrorism." For lack of anything more interesting to say, Boutros-Ghali went on to list all of these documents, describe their function, state whether they are in force, and if so, how many ratifications it received. One convention which has had some difficulty getting off the ground, much to Boutros-Ghali's dismay, is the "convention on the safety of United Nations personnel." While the positions of Boutros-Ghali and his colleagues are certainly prominent, most terrorist organizations probably would choose to focus their efforts on targets with some tangible power.
These conventions became the basis for what the Secretary-General described as his "plan of action," which basically boils down to his trying to convince United Nations members to vote to adopt these conventions. About halfway through, his words began to have the ring of campaign promises, but he has learned from the mistakes of past American presidential candidates. If one makes one's promises sufficiently ambiguous, the audience will have no way of assessing whether or not they have been fulfilled. "We must take the normative foundation provided by these [conventions] as a platform for immediate global action to counter terrorism. We must rally the political will to overcome the difficulties of international cooperation and coordination." When it comes time to decide whether Boutros-Ghali stays or goes, who will be able to answer whether he has successfully "rallied the political will" or taken sufficient "global action"?
Boutros-Ghali did bring up one interesting problem, which has been raised in the debates over anti-terrorism legislation here in the United States, namely "that the antiterrorist struggle is not pursued at the expense of human rights." Unfortunately again for the audience, he called this issue "a central problem," but added nothing beyond that.
As if to complete the analogy to the recent town hall-style presidential debate, the questions from the audience sounded like those asked of Clinton and Dole by members of the panel of citizens. Instead of "President Clinton, I am [insert ethnic group, gender, economic status, career choice]. What will you do to help me?" it was "Dr. Boutros-Ghali, I am from [insert name of small, oppressed country]. What will you do to help me?" Despite Boutros-Ghali's repeated efforts to focus the questions on terrorism, they strayed far from the subject of the lecture, perhaps due in part to its uncontroversial nature.
t is particularly interesting that both Clinton
and Dole have expressed their desire to have Dr. Boutros-Ghali replaced
as Secretary-General, since his views seem relatively harmless, since he
is likely to be succeeded by someone much more radical, and since, most
significantly, he sounds just like them.