UNITED NATIONS: Painful Perennials

Shortly before the U.N.’s Fourth General Assembly opened at Flushing Meadows this week, Secretary General Trygve Lie performed a solemn duty. He unveiled a commemorative plaque (the first in U.N.’s history) for U.N. Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, shot down just a year ago by assassins in Jerusalem. The best that could be said on this occasion was that, in the past year, neither the violence in Palestine nor any other of the world’s conflicts had flared into a general war.

The Assembly’s provisional 60-point agenda read like a slightly smudged carbon copy of last year’s. The big items were the painful old perennials, which various committees and commissions were tossing back to the Assembly: Indonesia, on which the Dutch are wearily trying to reach agreement with the Republicans; Korea, whose well-armed Northern Communist regime has refused even to admit U.N. commissioners into its territory; Israel, which is protesting violently against a U.N. plan to internationalize Jerusalem.