In Limbo

For a while it had looked as if the 19th General Assembly might meet only to break up. When it finally got under way--two months late so as to dodge the U.S. elections and an additional 35 minutes late because a tortured truce was being patched together--it was at least functioning. But just barely.

Secretary-General U Thant announced the truce terms: "Issues other than those that can be disposed of without objection will not be raised." In short, the Assembly agreed for the present not to handle anything of importance and to avoid taking any votes, while the U.S. postponed a formal demand to deprive Russia of its Assembly vote (under Article 19 of the Charter) for nonpayment of dues on the U.N. peacekeeping operations in the Congo and Suez. While the Assembly is in its limbo of talking without voting, the U.S. and Russia are having another go at working out a compromise.

Rescue Fund. Over lunch, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko agreed to let a U.N. committee suggest how future peacekeeping missions should be authorized and financed--presumably through the Security Council, where both nations have the veto. Although it was precisely to avoid the veto's paralysis that the West first moved some peacekeeping decisions to the Assembly, Western influence in the U.N. is gradually fading with the growth of the Afro-Asian bloc--which now comprises 60 of the organization's 115 member nations. Under the circumstances, some Washington officials are convinced that the day is not far off when the U.S. might want to be in a position to use its Security Council veto.

Russia accepted, in principle, the oft-proposed idea of a voluntary U.N. "rescue fund," to which it could contribute without directly supporting the operations it objects to. But the U.S. still insists that the Russians cannot have a voice in the Assembly before they make at least a token payment.

Positive Neutrality. Meanwhile, the Assembly conducted business by acclamation in order to avoid voting. It admitted three new nations--Malta, Malawi and Zambia--and elected its first black African president. Ghana's Ambassador Alex Quaison-Sackey, 40, festively garbed in orange and yellow tribal robes, took the chair alongside U Thant and Indian Under Secretary C. V. Narasimhan, symbolizing the U.N.'s ever-increasing Afro-Asian cast.

Like his boss, Kwame Nkrumah, the "Redeemer" of Ghana, Quaison-Sackey espouses "positive neutrality," but he has a far less abrasive personality, and has spoken out against "Communist colonialism" as well as the Western variety. He winces at the abusive anti-Western jargon tossed around by hardcore African leftists, is affable and accessible (he once served as chairman and honorary drummer of an international jazz festival in Central Park).

Quaison-Sackey went through Ghana's Achimota College, then was sent on to study political science and economics at Oxford. There, he recalls, he learned what it was to be an African: "Imagine yourself, if you please, walking in the streets of Oxford after an absorbing tutorial and being confronted by an English lady who asks you, 'Which of our possessions do you come from?' I clearly remember that I did not answer that question, but it continued to haunt me." He must have felt less haunted as he presided over the General Assembly, thanking his fellow delegates for his election as "an honor which goes far beyond my humble person, for this is a tribute to Africa."

While Alex Quaison-Sackey spoke, U Thant had his troubles. The major powers appointed him informal mediator, hoping that his patience could somehow resolve the payment issue. But at week's end, the mediator was taken to a New York hospital suffering from a suspected peptic ulcer.

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