Cold War’s End Dominates U.N. Debate

UNITED NATIONS — U.S.-Soviet harmony, disarmament and even the war against drugs have displaced Third World complaints at the annual United Nations debate this year, but diplomats predict that the old problems will soon return.

For nearly two decades, have-not nations have taken the stage to demand that the rich give them a bigger share of the world economy--what is referred to in shorthand as the North-South debate. However, the 1989 session, which will end Friday, has been dominated by the end of the Cold War and the blossoming prospects for settling a half-dozen regional conflicts.

Colombia’s President Virgilio Barco Vargas, in a speech last month that eclipsed the receptions given President Bush and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, barely mentioned development aid, which was the theme of his appearance here three years ago. Instead, quoting Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, Barco issued a clarion call for global cooperation in defeating drug trafficking--the “criminal enterprise” threatening not only his own government but all civilization.

Barco asked that the International Coffee Agreement be revived and that Colombia and Third World farmers receive additional economic aid to enable their producers to grow legitimate crops rather than marijuana and such botanicals as coca that are raw materials for narcotics.

Algerian Ambassador Hocine Djoudi, whose country in 1972 was one of the chief sponsors of a proposed New International Economic Order, said that issue has now moved not only to the back burner, but “completely off the stove.”

The proposal--enthusiastically endorsed by the poor nations and vigorously denounced by the United States and with only slightly less vigor by other industrialized nations--sought to promote producer cartels, to tie prices of raw materials directly to prices of manufactured goods and to give the developing world a bigger voice in international lending institutions and policy-making.

Djoudi and diplomats from other producer nations acknowledged that the end of the Cold War is as important to them as it is to the major powers, and they joined in applause when Bush proposed in his General Assembly address that new steps be taken to control chemical weapons. They clapped even longer the next day when Shevardnadze proposed what appeared to be an even more comprehensive ban on such weapons.

Criticism Missing

There was no open criticism among the delegates of Bush for saying nothing in his speech about development aid and of Shevardnadze for mentioning it only in passing. Firm public criticism would almost certainly have been voiced in earlier years.

An Arab delegates explained: “After all, the only use of chemical weapons in modern times has been in the developing world. We have more interest than the Americans and the Europeans because chemical warfare has taken lives in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.”

African demands for economic aid were muted this year in the face of progress toward independence of Namibia, a former German colony ruled since World War I by South Africa, and progress to a lesser degree toward resolving a dispute between Morocco and nationalists over the fate of the former Spanish Western Sahara.

The continuing struggle by black citizens of South Africa against apartheid also held the attention of African U.N. delegates this year, although Nigeria’s foreign minister, Maj. Gen. Ike Nwakchukwu, forcefully stressed development as the overriding need of the Third World.

A new voice for the world’s needy came from Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski of Poland. Although Skubiszewski spoke at length about political developments in Europe that have made possible the first non-Communist government in Warsaw since World War II, he also declared:

“The gap between the rich and poor widens,” and he placed Poland among the poor. “In the long run, this situation will hurt everybody because it will lead to an eruption of social discontent on an unprecedented scale.”

The Polish official joined others in expressing hopes for the success of a special session of the Assembly next year that will try to devise new economic strategies and methods of dealing with foreign debt.

Brazil’s President Jose Sarney said that without relief from their debt burdens, Latin America’s new democracies may fall victim to the “poverty, inequality, exploitation and violence that are part of our everyday life” in the developing world.

Foreign Minister Diego Cordovez of Ecuador said in an interview that poor nations’ issues necessarily take second place in a year of such important political changes. But he stressed that economic conditions can be as important to international security as the political climate.

“I have always felt that the developed countries approached the Third World with a charitable or philosophic attitude,” Cordovez said. “We should present our problem as a security issue.

“The drug threat has become a security issue for the United States. We should be saying the same thing about our debt. It’s a political problem, not an economic one.”

Cordovez, a former U.N. official who helped negotiate the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, said that political impact of economic decisions has been driven home to him in his new role in Ecuador’s government.

“We have to measure the danger of political destabilization each time we increase the price of fuel,” he said. “We have the image of Caracas before us.” (A wave of rioting that claimed 200 lives followed rises in food and fuel prices in Venezuela earlier this year.)

“We want the developed countries to share our concern and see that we really are living in an interdependent world,” he said.