UN and plane hijacking

It always happens, to all of us. You complain that you haven't heard from your brother or your old buddy in almost a year and there is a letter in today's post.

Last week, some of you may recall, I talked about the gradual, but drastic, decline in the general reputation of the United Nations and how this was reflected in the greatly reduced space given to it in the press. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the newspapers read by most people listening to me very rarely carry any coverage at all. Now, in fairness, I ought to say that to the serious papers of the world, they're not run on the principle of merely reflecting popular reputations, papers like the New York Times, La Prensa, as was anyway, Le Monde, the London Sunday Times are, I imagine, more concerned with the seats of power and the shifts of power, whether or not they have any popular reputation at all. 

To make this point more simply, it can be demonstrated through any period of history, from the day newspapers were invented to last night, that responsible papers appoint their chief foreign correspondents to the countries which have most power and so can affect the lives of all of us. 

Before the Second War, the top correspondents' jobs on any paper on earth were London, Paris, Rome, Berlin and – if you could get in there and stay there – Moscow. After the Second War, Washington became the top job. It was the same, by the way, with the diplomatic corps. The summit of a diplomat's career was either Washington or Moscow, the capitals of the two superpowers. And since then new strains of foreign correspondents have been bred to make themselves experts on the Arab kingdoms or on Communism or on South Africa or China. 

Well, in talking last time about the United Nations on its 32nd birthday, I noticed how in 1945 and the years immediately following there never seemed to be enough room at the United Nations' headquarters for the hundreds of correspondents from around the world who were permanently assigned to its doings. These days, I remarked, it was rare to see any long piece datelined United Nations, NY. 

At which point, suddenly, and no thanks to me, the papers bulged with the story that 42 nations have pressed for an immediate debate in the General Assembly on the safety of international aviation and this week the entire 149 member nations sat down in the assembly's special political committee to begin it. A lot of us felt more than relief, something more like gratitude bordering on jubilation that a matter which threatens airplane travellers all round the globe – let's call it the 'success' of the new terrorism – should be brought to the place it surely belongs. 

Of course the pressure for a world debate was intensified by the recent Lufthansa hijacking. The idea had been in the works down on the agenda for some time, but what made it suddenly come alive was the killing of the Lufthansa pilot in Aden. Quite likely the United Nations General Assembly would have moved the item on airplane safety up on the agenda, but then the International Airline Pilots' Association threatened a worldwide strike and put it up to the United Nations to do something, or else. 

The UN acted with uncommon dispatch two days after the airline pilots set their strike for last Tuesday. Mr Waldheim, the Secretary-General, asked to meet their leaders and so he did. He offered to let them send their own expert witnesses to testify in the debate. This is as unusual as it's encouraging. It makes the United Nations, for once, seem as serious and expeditious as a United States Senate investigation. And to rub in the point, in Washington, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the chairman of a relevant committee, asked for committee meetings to press for a law to punish countries that give asylum to hijackers, by way of cutting off trade or American aid. 

Meanwhile, the airline pilots – who are understandably dead serious about the whole thing – went into discussions with the American stevedores, the maritime transport union, to try and get them to boycott ocean commerce as a sympathetic action in support of an air pilots' strike, if it's called. The president of the International Federation of Airline Pilots, which represents more than 50,000 pilots in 65 countries (more than half of them are Americans) says that he expects to speak before the assembly debate and will watch the progress and the transcripts of it to see if something positive is going to be done. 

This promise, or warning, does, I think, reflect the ordinary man and woman's feeling everywhere that the United Nations, in its general debates to go no further, does tend to talk and argue and in the end come up with nothing better than a resolution condemning some action or some country. And, having expressed its anger or regret, it moves on to another expression of anger or regret. 

At the moment, anyway, there is the rare promise of international action because the real world of the airline pilot is bringing all the pressure to bear on the debating world of the United Nations. 

As a first step, what's being talked about is some way of forcing nations to sign and obey an international convention which would require them to hand out severe punishments to hijackers. Our euphoria over these brisk moves is given pause, however, by the knowledge that there is already in existence a convention, a Hague convention which requires this to be done. It's seven years old and it was solemnly signed and agreed to by most of the UN members, all but about a third. Unfortunately, they are the countries in which hijackers regularly seek – and very often get – asylum. 

And maybe at this point I ought to say something about an international agency which few people know much about but which has played THE influential part, since the Second War, in the control of civil aviation. Well, it didn't really come into its own until right after the war, when the development of a four-engine, long-range aircraft made transoceanic flights a practical matter. Obviously the jet made them a worldwide industry. Inevitably different nations had different ideas about safety standards and where they could fly and where they couldn't. 

The first clash was between the United States and the United Kingdom in the first international conference to consider the control of air transport. That was in November 1944. Roughly, the United States wanted free competition based on complete freedom of the air and the UK and some other Europeans wanted to provide against wasteful competition but also wanted to see that any country could have a preferential share of the traffic through its own air space. From the beginning, there was no serious suggestion of transferring to aviation the code of Freedom of the Seas which controls maritime policy. 

Well, even though America and Britain didn't agree about the limits of commercial competition, everyone agreed that every nation has a sovereign right to the air above it. 

Well, the discussion in Chicago, in 1944, led to the founding of the international agency I mentioned – ICAO – the International Civil Aviation Organisation, with headquarters in Montreal. More than any other body, it has been responsible for setting international standards of safe aircraft, crew, licensing, rules of the air, the language, the official language that pilots use between aircraft, meteorological codes, aircraft markings, the development of ground control approach, instrument landing systems, investigation of accidents, immigration and customs practices, even designing the standard form of airplane ticket which you purchase at every ticket counter in the world. 

If I seem to go on in uncontrolled enthusiasm about ICAO, it's because the word still appears to mean nothing to most people and because some 14 years ago under the auspices of the United Nations, four of us flew around the world to film the variety of ICAO's services. We were a typical United Nations team, a white South African producer, a black Harlem director, a Swedish cameraman and me. 

We saw, under ICAO rules, planes being elaborately checked and scrutinised in Sydney, after two round the world flights. In Thailand we saw boys who drive nothing more complicated than bullocks being taught to fly prop planes and by now, no doubt, jets. In India we saw a night-time team of controllers watching the weather maps and controlling the traffic through the monsoon regions of the sub-continent. 

In London, we saw a whole room filled with a model made of tubes or frozen spaghetti, which exactly represented the routes, the highways in the sky and the glide paths along which all the traffic from Europe and the Americas could be brought to safety through bad weather. We saw the latest developments in airport design in Cairo, which was then something of a pioneer in airport architecture. 

But I don't think in all the hazards of civil aviation that we came to respect and the protections we came to admire, that the thought of hijacking ever crossed our minds. If anybody had suggested that within the decade there would be an international association of terrorists organising hijacking, we would have thought him even more unreal than John F. Kennedy when he boasted, 'We'll have a man on the moon before the decade is out.' 

No doubt the General Assembly will get out something stronger than a resolution. The knowledgeable people I've talked to doubt that every nation will sign it. Some nations, run by extremists or hoping to be so run, have clearly something to gain by harbouring other extremists, protection from retaliation, and there are obsessive terrorists who hold their lives cheap, which disposes of the solution I once offered – a solution created by pure intelligence like the traffic light, which is likely to punish equally the doer and the done-to. 

Undoubtedly much more severe security measures at appalling cost will have to be practised at the airports. But apart from that obvious move, we can only watch this debate, keep our fingers crossed and hope that the pressure is kept up on the United Nations by the people who have most to lose – the endangered species of the airline pilot.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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