How Waldheim the Nazi Set the Tone for Terror

By Harris O. Schoenberg

The death of former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim this month at a time when terrorist forces appear to be rallying once again, brings to mind the role Mr. Waldheim played in the legitimization of international terrorism by the UN.

The international environment in which Israel operated after its Olympic athletes were brutally murdered in Munich in 1972, in violation of the Olympic truce, fed a sense of isolation that framed the decision of its government to strike back, not in a quest for revenge, but in order to deter the terrorists or at least make it difficult for them to continue to operate in the open.

In Munich the games continued with hardly a pause, despite calls to cancel them after the bloody terrorist attack. In European countries, those responsible for the Munich attack and for others came and went freely. Even when intelligence agencies captured the terrorists, governments ordered them released. Perhaps the cruelest blow of all came in New York, where the United Nations, which aspired to be a moral force in the world, began to recognize, sanitize, and legitimize the terrorists.

The person responsible for setting the tone of the UN debate on terrorism for the next decade was Waldheim, who had been in office nine months. It was not for another decade that the world learned that he had been indicted as a Nazi war criminal.

A few days after the Munich Olympics massacre, a delegation led by David M. Blumberg, the international president of B’nai Brith, visited Waldheim at the UN.

At the time I did not think of Kurt Waldheim as an angel. But I did think he had a good sense of public relations, and that a window of opportunity had opened. Most nations of the world were horrified by the new scourge of international terrorism that originated in the grisly competition of two factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) –Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –for funds and recruits. Waldheim had the opportunity to unite the nations of the world to combat this scourge. It would be a triumph for him and for the UN.

Waldheim listened to the Jewish representatives, but was noncommittal. He said he would take their appeal for action under advisement. Coaxed by the United States Mission, with whom the delegates had also spoken, a few days later Waldheim inscribed on the agenda of the General Assembly, as the UN Charter permitted him to do, a new agenda item on measures to prevent international terrorism.

No sooner did word get out then intense pressure from the Arab delegates assaulted him, in particular from the representative of Saudi Arabia, Jamil Baroody, a man who inserted bigotry into his every UN speech.

Quickly intimidated by the Arabs, who induced a number of Africans to support them, Waldheim abandoned his stand against terrorism within hours, and the next morning tried to retrieve the item. But it was too late. The new Under-Secretary-General for General Assembly Affairs, Bradford Morse, a former Congressman from Massachusetts who was at the UN only four months, had considered the item so important that he and his deputy, Tim Rothermel, had worked late into the night to get the paperwork done, and it had already been distributed as a UN document.

So Waldheim went back to Baroody and the two sat down in the proverbial smoke-filled back room. Out of this meeting came the idea to leave the item but change its title in a way that would substantially alter its character in line with the Arab insistence that terrorism – that is, indiscriminate slaughter to instill fear for a political or economic purpose — was a legitimate form of political expression by the frustrated.

The Secretary-General now called his initiative: “Measures to prevent international terrorism , which endangers or takes innocent human lives or jeopardizes fundamental freedoms, and study of the underlying causes of those forms of terrorism and acts of violence which lie in misery, frustration, grievance and despair, and which cause some people to sacrifice human lives, including their own, in an attempt to effect radical changes.”

At 58 words, this was the longest UN agenda item title to date, and its new focus had dangerous implications. If emphasis was given to “underlying causes,” if “misery” and “frustration” were the evils and not the overt acts of terror, then terrorism, instead of being discouraged, could be tolerated, justified, and even legitimized.

And so it was. Following Waldheim’s retreat, the UN reacted to Munich and to subsequent acts of terrorism by saying, for much too long, that it’s all right to act depraved as long as you feel deprived. And this emboldened first the PLO and then the current generation of terrorists. n

Dr. Schoenberg serves as president of UN Reform Advocates. He is the author of the prize-winning book, A Mandate for Terror and Combating Terrorism: The Role of the UN.

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