UN Leader Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali - 20 December 1996

There was a human scene took place in New York this past week that will not be forgotten by anybody who saw it or was a part of it. I'm not sure that even now, four days later, I can recall its most emotional moment without, as England's most famous statesman used to say, without blubbing. In the assembly hall of the United Nations, a man in his mid-seventies – a medium sized swarthy man with a troubled face, an old scholar, diplomat, an aristocrat from an ancient country – finished speaking, bowed slightly and started to leave the rostrum.

The best the newspapers could do was to write the old phrase: "The General Assembly hailed the outgoing leader with a standing ovation".

I have seen some standing ovations in my time but this one, breaking the silence of that enormous room, was as startling as a tidal wave coming out of nowhere and roaring along an empty beach. It was an ovation of admiration and of defiance: admiration for this greatly harassed Egyptian and roaring defiance against the great power he – in a bitter farewell speech – had himself dared to defy, the one power, superpower left: the United States of America.

Mr Butros Butros-Ghali is not – never was I imagine – an orator, but he made a procession of dry words fairly crackle with anger and disdain. Sad anger at the United States whose 1.3 billion dollar unpaid dues had thrown the United Nations into the financial doldrums, and disdain quite plainly directed at Washington, London and Paris, though he skirted the rudeness of naming them. But they it was, he plainly implied, to whom as a new secretary general he'd gone to give force and reality to his dream of effective peacemaking. He had requested thirty-five thousand troops to protect the Security Council's designated safe havens. With the guarded nod of the United States, he got just under eight thousand.

The effect, he said, was to turn the concept of peacekeeping on its head and made things worse by advertising the great gap between what the United Nations seemed willing to command and its unwillingness to pay for it. First in Somalia, and the failure there weakened the will of the world community to act against genocide in Rwanda.

He was I think, too deeply disgusted to do more than mention Bosnia, but in private he has wrung his hands and his patience at recalling the many times he begged for a decisive response to the early fighting. He countered the cry, which has been the main complaint of the United States, for reforms in the structure and financing of the United Nations. No reforms of the structure will help, he implied, until there emerges from the member states the political will to take hard decisions, whatever the structure.

On the United Nations' financial plight, he barely cloaked his anger at the United States with a diplomatic front. I quote:

"We know what causes it and what is needed to end it. It is not the result of mismanagement. It is the refusal to fulfil a treaty obligation, which is incidentally no more and no less than the obligation to pay your debts".

He fell short of the ugly particulars that the American debt is well over half the total bill the United Nations is owed for the regular budget and we should note, for peacekeeping.

I think it's only fair to throw in the reminder that the normal American contribution since the beginning of the UN fifty-one years ago has always been more than half the whole United Nations budget. So everybody got used, down the decades, to the United States paying most other people's way, and it is true that in the past ten years or so the UN, like other large bureaucracies, has suffered from much waste, reproduced labour, made work, and has grown prickly with the barnacles of corruption, of too many perks for an inflated staff secure in jobs they assumed would go on forever.

But Mr Butros Butros-Ghali is undoubtedly right in his main contention. If he was a tougher but no less truthful orator, he might have said that what the United Nations needs is not a leaner structure but a stronger backbone.

Well I'd not meant to do more than recall the never-to-be-forgotten moment when a hundred and eighty odd nations rose at him and for him, but I felt we couldn't say a merely casual goodbye to a good man who worked himself to the nerve ends and failed to instil into the great powers a courage they don't collectively possess.

That's the bad news.

There's lots of good news, some that we ignore or actually forget about. From the beginning of the UN, there was the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which deals with hunger across the globe, and it did so from the beginning in many ingenious ways, especially alert to avoiding blanket solutions like sending refrigerators to needy Scandinavians.

I remember once a poor fishing port on the African coast getting central heating units, which they barely knew what to do with. Somebody in New York had the wit to replace them with outboard motors, which in six months doubled the fishing catch.

I for one, cannot speak with moderation about the World Health Organisation, its centre in Geneva, that has been responsible more than any other institution for maintaining the health of the many millions who travel and the people they meet. The agency keeps a 24-hour watch on infectious epidemics everywhere in the world, checking every reported suspicious illness of an airplane passenger who drops off in a foreign country. International aviation has surely spread many marvels and conveniences. It can also spread disease with a speed and virulence unimaginable only, say, fifty years ago.

And talking about aviation, don't forget the UN body that's responsible for inventing a common language for pilots everywhere. Of regularising immigration and customs practices, of making uniform safety rules, setting an international standard of air worthiness, making uniform the whole routine of traffic control.

I think of those early men and women headquartered in Montreal, whenever I look closely at my airplane ticket. Everywhere in the world, it has the same shape, the information is printed in the same slots, the indented form of your current flight is exactly the same. It was the invention of an early staff member of ICAO, the UN's International Civil Aviation Organisation.

But the one agency I want to celebrate more than another on its fiftieth birthday, is one that has a regular chunk of the UN budget, but also one whose budget is powerfully swollen, increased by the universal sale of its Christmas cards – a helpful offering which shouldn't be begrudged even by Senator Jesse Helms, the southerner who, as Chairman of the Senate Relations Committee has the power single-handedly to deny the president his choice of ambassadors and postpone forever the payment of the American debt to the United Nations.

The wholly splendid agency I have in mind is UNICEF, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. What emergency? With one child in three throughout the world going to bed hungry, there is always an emergency. And from the beginning UNICEF has attracted it seems, a type of human – doctors, nurses, willing orderlies – who quickly learn the root simplicities of healthcare that can be practically applied to the very poor and the very hungry.

They could have had as their patron saint a world famous American epidemiologist I was close to, an old austere New Englander who snorted every time he saw a new, glittering hospital wing go up, a gleaming affair of glass and steel. He used to bully his students with the news that for most of the populations of the earth, medicine has less to do with what he called "fancy architecture" than with, as he calmly put it: "Carbolic soap, sunshine, unpolished rice and clean water".

UNICEF made a discovery almost thirty years ago, that a great medical journal called potentially the most important medical advance of the century. And what was this technological miracle? Adding a small proper amount of glucose and salt to water, which would keep it in the digestive tract long enough to be absorbed. And what led to this miraculous discovery? The simple, brutal fact that what kills more poor children than anything else is dehydration from diarrhoea. The mortality rate used to be five millions a year. It's now closer to two millions.

UNICEF itself packages little sachets of salt and sugar to mix with water. They cost ten cents a piece and are produced in sixty nations. It all began fifty years ago with the distribution of powdered milk to the famished children of post-war Europe. It had a budget fight in the 1950s which won enough money to sponsor, on the poorer continents, vaccination against yaws and tuberculosis.

Well UNICEF is still at it, but this week it celebrated its fiftieth birthday in a shocking way, with a grave document that points a charge, mainly at the nations of Asia and Africa, where it reports hundreds of millions of children work more than twenty hours a day. It's a devastating report on the world's record of what really amounts to child slavery.

And in case we in the so-called civilised democracies feel foolish pride in our concern for the others, it adds the stony note that child labour unchecked and un-prohibited is very much on the increase in the USA and the United Kingdom.

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