United Nations: Package Deal

After months of public haggling, the U.N. Security Council last week succumbed to Russian blackmail and voted in two new members: Mauritania and the Mongolian People’s Republic (Outer Mongolia).

For 15 years Russia has tried to bully the U.N. into admitting Outer Mongolia, its oldest satellite. Wedged between Russia and Red China, Outer Mongolia is an Alaska-sized territory of 1,000,000 nomadic people; hide-covered tent villages still dot the high plateaus, and the country still depends economically on its 21 million head of horses, camels, yaks and sheep. Led by the U.S. and Nationalist China, the West has always been able to block the admission of Outer Mongolia to the U.N. on the grounds that it was not an independent nation, but since 1924 a Russian puppet.

With the admission of the new African nations into the U.N., Russia finally had a means of forcing the issue. Ignoring the prohibition on package admissions implicit in the U.N. charter, Russian Delegate Valerian Zorin offered the West a deal: Outer Mongolia for Mauritania, one of the newly independent nations in the “Brazzaville group,” twelve former French territories.

Zorin had two things going for him: the U.S. and Nationalist China wanted to keep Red China out of the U.N., and the Brazzaville group wanted Mauritania in. Privately, the Brazzaville group threatened that if the West and Nationalist China vetoed Outer Mongolia, forcing a retaliatory Russian veto of Mauritania, they would support the admission of Communist China.

Counting up noses, the U.S. saw that without the Brazzaville group, it probably would be unable to shelve the question of seating Red China this year (by having it declared a substantive issue—or one requiring a two-thirds majority). Pressure was brought to bear on Nationalist China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek by President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Ambassador to Nationalist China Everett Drumright to give up his veto of Outer Mongolia. Chiang refused to budge; he feared that membership for Outer Mongolia was only the first step in the U.N. recognition of Red China. Bitterly, he sent a letter to France’s Charles de Gaulle, asking for his help in threatening or importuning the French Africans; De Gaulle replied that he dared not intervene lest the Brazzaville group be aroused against France. Finally Chiang gave in. Decrying Russian “blackmail.” Nationalist China walked out of the Security Council, but did not veto; the U.S. abstained, permitting Outer Mongolia’s “unanimous” admission. Moments later, Mauritania too was admitted, becoming the U.N.’s 103rd member.

Blackmail though it was, the U.S. and Nationalist China had won a reprieve on the seating of Red China.