The Re-Election of U Thant

For eleven months, U Thant had made it perfectly clear that he did not want to continue as Secretary-General of the United Nations. The Americans were complicating his life by bombing North Viet Nam, the Russians and French by refusing to pay their share of U.N. peace-keeping operations in the Middle East, the Congo and Cyprus. Besides, as nominal head of an organization composed of 121 sovereign states, he was, as he put it in September, when he announced that he definitely would not seek another term, merely "a glorified clerk." Yet last week, to the surprise of practically no one and to the relief of practically everyone, U Thant agreed to serve a second five-year term. The General Assembly hastily re-elected him by a vote of 120-0.

Nothing particularly dramatic lay behind his change of heart. The Security Council issued a vaguely worded memorandum hinting that he might in the future have a few additional powers, and there was an indication that the tightfisted Russians might come through with $7,000,000 to help the U.N. pay some of its bills. But most of the same old problems were still there. As U Thant himself told the Assembly in accepting the appointment, there was no reason for him "to have new hope" that his second term would be much smoother than his first. The main factor in his decision to stay on, in fact, was simply that the U.N. had pleaded with him to do so.

Remembering the great Troika crisis that nearly destroyed the U.N. the last time it had to look for a new Secretary-General, none of the organization's members wanted to go through the traumatic process of searching for a replacement. Besides, despite the futility of his first term, U Thant had impressed the great powers that he was an honest, if bland, broker for the conflicts of the world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.