In its earliest years, the Security Council was the focal point for efforts to keep the peace by fact-finding and mediation. It sent commissions to Indonesia and Kashmir to investigate complaints brought before it and to negotiate differences. The General Assembly sent similar commissions to the Balkans, Korea and Palestine.
The Assembly partitioned Palestine, a British mandate, into Jewish and Arab sectors in 1947. Fighting erupted when surrounding Arab countries rejected the UN decision and invaded the newly proclaimed state of Israel. To monitor one truce in the fighting, the Security Council created the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, the first full-fledged UN peacekeeping operation, with military officers on the UN payroll and under control of the Secretary-General. Although that truce did not last long, UNTSO became the longest-lived and most versatile of the 35 peacekeeping ventures established in the United Nations' first half-century.
The initial round of Arab-Israeli fighting was ended by UN mediator Ralph Bunche, an American who was instrumental in drafting the UN Charter provisions for trusteeship and decolonization at San Francisco in 1945. His tactic in dealing with Middle East conflict was to isolate the negotiators in the cold, damp and remote Hotel des Roses on the island of Rhodes, with its execrable food and bad communications. There, Arab and Israeli officers ate together and sometimes sat across the table in direct negotiations. But it was Bunche who made the proposals. With a keen sense of what each side needed and could live with, he drafted and redrafted armistice texts that were impeccably balanced. Israeli delegate Walter Eytan wrote that Bunche "was gifted, some thought almost a genius, at drafting; sooner or later he was able to contrive a formula to defeat almost any problem."
At one point Bunche wrote to his wife, Ruth: "I talk, argue, coax and threaten these stubborn people day and night╔This is killing work. I haven't been out of the hotel for two weeks now." The only evening recreation was billiards and ping-pong, and Bunche, a master at both since his student days at the University of California at Los Angeles, established psychological domination by beating all comers. He orchestrated pressure by calling in sanction threats from the Security Council or the major powers when he needed them, and by issuing his own threats to quit or go public over unreasonable demands. Bunche, who came to personify the impartial international civil servant, ran the UN's peacekeeping operations from 1948 until his death in 1971. For the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbors, he won a Nobel Peace Prize.
By: Michael J. Berlin (excerpt from Keeping the Peace) From: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
