UNITED NATIONS: Fighting almost single-handed against the non-aligned nations steamroller, the United States is increasingly forced to use its veto, earning a “bad guy” image in the world organization.
So far this year, U.S. Delegates in the 15-nation U.N. Security Council have been using the veto at the rate of one a month.
The latest was last week when Nicaraguan President Daniel Onega came before the council to demand that the United Nations order the United States to stop supporting Nicaraguan rebel guerrillas.
The resolutions, whose approval the United States blocked by using the veto, ranged from various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the question of sanctions against South Africa to the April 15, U.S. Raid on Libya as well as the dispute with the Sand insist regime in Nicaragua. On South African sanctions, the United States is usually joined in a veto by Britain, on rare occasions, such as the Libyan raid, both Britain and France joined the US, in blocking a condemnation by the Security Council.
But most of the time, the United. States veto stands alone. Invariably, the resolutions before the council are drafted by the Coordinating Bureau of the 101- nation Non-aligned Movement, – the body with which the United States in recent years has been waging a war of words growing in heat and bittiness.
Washington’s U.N. Ambassador, Gen. Vernon Walters, has repeatedly referred to “the alignment of the non-aligned against the United States” and “the use of double standards by the non- aligned.”
He has often accused them of being “scandalously one-sided”. He has pointed out the incongruity of such nations as Cuba or Soviet- occupied Afghanistan, Vietnam or communist North Korea, or radical Arab states like Libya and Syria claiming non-aligned status.
Walters reserved some of his greatest ire for the non-aligned resolution condemning the U.S. raid on Libya without any reference to the terrorism that triggered it.
“This text is the product of perverted thinking that distorts log- values and common sense”, he said. “It equates the criminal with his victim”.
The non-aligned movement, – born more than 30 years ago, has become an institution with rotating chairmanship every three years and summit meetings laying down policy on a whole range of sub- jets. The next summits on Sept. 1 in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, where that southern African country will take over the movement’s chairmanship from India.
Except for a brief diversion against Moscow after the Soviet Union sent its troops into Afghanistan more than six years ago, the chief target of the political strategy of the non-aligned movement in recent years has been the United States,
The attacks are not limited to political issues. With the growing problems of the huge international debt run up by the world’s poor nations, the non-aligned bloc-and the even larger 127-nation Third World economic conglomeration known as the “Group of77”-have been hitting hard at the United States on just about every economic issue under the sun.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 8, 1986
