Arafat visits New York

It must be all of 20 years ago that I was the innocent witness to a New York scene, the like of which never happened again. I was coming in to town from LaGuardia Airport, on I should have said, a normal weekday, but what was immediately abnormal was the sight of practically a battalion of police deplored in small rings around every detector entrance and every exit.

As I joined a small queue on the taxi line, one of the police rings broke up and the team courteously and without fuss checked each one of us, who we were, where we were going. Eventually I was almost stuffed into a cab in the nicest fashion and I was on my way.

Out on the highway, the noticeable thing was the absence of traffic. It might have been Yom Kippur when New York gives the appearance of an abandoned city – no wonder with perhaps two million souls, off the streets busy atoning for multiple sins. But it wasn't Yom Kippur and pretty soon another oddity came into view: about every 200 yards on the shoulder of the highway was a parked police car. I'd seen security precautions before, but nothing remotely like this. The cab driver wasn't much help, it's the Arabs he kept saying. Then of course it struck me: the United Nations. It was October, the time of the annual General Assembly meeting. And that very day, I now remembered, a man was coming in who Americans, especially Americans in the American Jewish capital, regarded as the most fearsome villain alive. His name was Yasser Arafat. He was to speak before the Assembly like the other heads of state and/or government, which he did in his chequered headscarf, olive green uniform and, at his waist, a gun in a holster. When he'd done he bowed himself out elaborately and was gone.

I learned later that he'd fooled the people, including the New York Police Department, perhaps by cunning design. He never did take the highway from LaGuardia to the U.N., he flew into LaGuardia changed rapidly to a helicopter rattled over to the East River landed on a lawn by the Security Council building, was whisked in half an hour later, whisked out and on his way to the Holy Land wherever. So you can imagine what the security situation was going to be like this year, this week, when the world organisation – which had started in San Francisco with 51 nations – this time invited the heads or delegates from 185 nations, most of whom certainly have enemies at large who would be quite willing for honour's sake or for a consideration, to see them removed from office, if not from this earth.

As for the wretched New Yorkers what was promised for Sunday through Tuesday was what we used to call a massive traffic jam, and now call gridlock. Sunday, the day of arrivals was, D-Day for protest groups from all over, jostling each other at the plaza – the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza – fronting on the assembly building, where slick limousines slid to a red carpeted entrance and unloaded their celebrated passengers. Thousands outside waving placards, making fists, chanting their own separate grievances, a great band of Cubans crying: "Cuba Si, Castro No!" He was the star this time. But I ought to say that not very far off, up in Harlem, where Fidel Castro spoke to a packed church, there were rejoicing hundreds cheering every other sentence he shouted out about our imperialism and his care of the poor. But down at the U.N. Plaza you had to be something of a political savour as well as a world geographer to know what they all wanted, whom they hated, why they were there.

There was a goodly choir of Tibetans crying "Shame on China," and we all know why, but how about a Belarus group bellowing,"Who is the enemy of freedom?" Why Lukaschenko of course. Kurds abominating Turkish fascism, so-called. Pakistanis thumping the air and shouting "Go back Bhutto." For once, protesters were not denouncing leaders thousands of miles away, the villains were here or soon going to be, including the former villain and now at worst a friend, at best a hero, Mr Arafat.

In the incoming rush of the famous and the infamous nothing was said about how he got here, and we might not have noticed him if the Mayor of New York City immediately scalded by the White House hadn't asked Mr Arafat to leave a concert given for the world leaders. Mr Arafat's speech was tucked away on the inside of the New York Times and what a lyrical charming piece it was. After all these years about as threatening as John Major: "The winds of change are blowing," he said. "A new world order is emerging." He came to us he said this time, with "love and peace" and "an olive branch," no gun holster this time!

By the way, he made one plea, which was repeated and will be made over and over by the smaller nations from Asia and Latin America and also by big boys like Germany and Japan, and that is a plea to reconstitute the United Nations Security Council. It was set up in 1945 as the prime instrument for keeping the peace, able, according to the charter, to summon troops, arms, material from every member nation. But since this obligation is one that every nation has ducked, the Council's action has more often than not taken the form of imposing sanctions or embargoes.

In the original setup, the Council had eleven members and it's increased the number several times, but there were only five permanent members who alone had the power to veto any action voted by the Council. And as listeners with a touch of grey will groan to recall, for years and years, every substantial action voted by our side – namely the United States, Britain, France – was briskly and automatically vetoed by the Soviet Union. Anyway, the permanent five are still the same, the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia and it has been well said they reflect the power reality of 1945 not of today.

The recreating of the Security Council, whether or not it will have any affect on effective action against aggression, is probably the only serious work that will come out of this huge meeting, which is obviously ceremonial, a fancy and rhetorical celebration. And what's to celebrate? Better say, recognition, of the 50th birthday of the United Nations.

For the rest, the bringing together of an unprecedented number of heads of state and government has, I think, done other good things. It may have punctured the stereotypes we all carry in our heads of what constitutes a diplomat. There's a type of New Yorker, usually a small businessman, who has to find a parking place everyday, who deeply and vocally resents the entire United Nations because its member delegates have diplomatic license plates that give them preferential parking – ambassadors that is with cars. Perhaps that's the first preconception to fall. Most of us I believe, think of an ambassador as distinguished looking, in a foxy patrician way, comfortably used to being bowed to and fawned upon and of course maintained in the lavish style he and his predecessors have grown accustomed to.

Well of the 140 odd nations represented this week – that's how many showed up – well over half have a United Nations' residency here that consists of a small apartment, which is an office as well. And the ambassador may have an assistant and a secretary but that's it. It is only a minority of the nations that maintain a lavishly permanent residence and an office annex or building – such splendour is reserved for the prosperous or what we call the developed nations, but after all, two thirds of the U.N.'s members come from poor or very poor what we call developing nations.

I remember once writing a script for a United Nations television show in which India as well as other nations, indignantly objected to the word 'underdeveloped' – which had come to be accepted by the poor countries – however bleak their future however mired in poverty, they insisted on being called 'developing'.

So more typical of most ambassadors to the U.N. this week is the case of an African who lives in a suburban apartment with his wife, she babysits to supplement his modest income, his children go to the local public school, he takes the subway, the tube, to Manhattan to a one room office, where he says, I type, I file, I answer the phone, I am diplomat, administrator and secretary all in one. This is not an extreme case, it's more typical than the grandeur implied and embodied in the Park Avenue mansions of us big boys.

And what apart from sitting through interminable debates and talk-fests most of the year, what are most of the ambassadors called on to do? To cast votes of course. But their finest hour comes when they find their country has been called up as part of a peacekeeping force. They presumably follow every day, the role and the physical safety of their men, but they are called on to act only in a crisis of a sort never reported. For instance, the time when two national units of a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Middle East threatened a sit down strike, if not a mutiny, unless their daily rations could include their own national basic food. I remembered this crisis going all the way up to the Secretary General's office. It was solved by the intervention of the Irish and Tunisian ambassadors, first to the U.N., and then to the United States. The Tunisians calmed down, they got their daily couscous, the Irish sang a chorus of Mother Machree or some other national anthem when the good word came through, henceforth their daily bread would be supplemented with a ration of their beloved potatoes.

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