The New York Times

Friday, January 21, 2000

Mr. Helms at the U.N.

The United Nations Security Council has long echoed with heated confrontations. But there has never been anything quite like the strained but polite scene yesterday as Senator Jesse Helms sat in the council chamber and warned that the United States would withdraw if the U.N. sought "to impose its presumed authority on the American people without their consent." Several members of the Security Council disputed Mr. Helms, but with utmost diplomacy. In the end, like most disagreements at the U.N., the exchange was healthy for all sides. It was even likely to increase understanding between the United Nations and its critics in Congress and throughout the United States.

Mr. Helms's visit, arranged by Richard Holbrooke, the United States representative to the U.N., was not just a ceremonial drop-in by a prominent American legislator. Senator Helms has been a vociferous critic of the organization, charging it with incompetence and inaction when he is not accusing it of trying to become a coercive world government. Yet despite his criticism, Mr. Helms, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, helped broker the deal that led to approval by Congress last year of paying nearly $1 billion in back dues to the U.N. in exchange for structural reforms there, some of them long overdue. If there is a tradition of outsiders speaking at the U.N., Senator Helms was a reasonable choice.

As both Mr. Holbrooke and Mr. Helms noted, the United Nations cannot be indifferent to its standing in Congress. Both cited the example of another chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, leading the Senate after World War I to reject President Woodrow Wilson's treaty creating the League of Nations, with disastrous consequences. It was good for Mr. Helms to visit and see for himself that the United Nations is not a faceless institution that exists outside its members, but a reflection of the members themselves and their imperfect efforts to avoid conflict and promote human rights in the world.

At the outset of his speech the senator said he was extending "my hand of friendship," and he hoped that listeners would accept his criticism in that spirit. It was to the credit of the other members of the Security Council that they did just that. They were also right to rebut Mr. Helms's fallacious arguments, pointing out that it is not right for any nation to decide whether to pay dues to the United Nations based on the issues of the moment, or to equate agreements on international norms with loss of sovereignty. When Mr. Helms complained about the billions of dollars spent by the United States on the U.N., other poorer nations rightly pointed out that their support, with payments and peacekeeping troops, was an even greater sacrifice.

Before it was over, the entire exercise proved to be a revealing discourse on the nature of international law and order in the post-cold-war world. Mr. Helms listened politely even as Martin Andjaba, the Namibian delegate, criticized the Reagan Doctrine of supporting anti-Communist insurgencies as having spread suffering in Africa. At the end, the senator offered a salute to Mr. Andjaba, said he was pleased to talk to people he had never met and predicted that the disagreements "will all work out." It was not a bad day's business at an institution that needs greater understanding in order to succeed.