It was in many ways the strangest of outings.
Fourteen foreign envoys and Richard Holbrooke, the ubiquitous U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, visited Washington Thursday as individual sightseers–just 14 guys and one woman, Patricia Durrant of Jamaica. It was not, they said emphatically, an official visit by the UN Security Council.
That didn’t stop the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from distributing a press packet labeled “Visit of the United Nations Security Council to the United States Senate.”
And it didn’t stop Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador, from preparing his wardrobe for the chance of a meeting with President Clinton.
“I am wearing a white shirt, just in case,” said Lavrov, who, as it turned out, did not get to meet with Clinton, who was in New York raising money for Democratic candidates.
The leisurely beginning of the day included a Senate history lesson, a guided tour of the Capitol and a lavish lunch in the Russell Senate office building, all arranged by Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who heads the committee, and its ranking Democrat, Joseph Biden of Delaware.
But the diplomatic gloves came off Thursday afternoon.
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At a “round table discussion”–remember, this wasn’t an official hearing–one ambassador after another criticized the Foreign Relations Committee for America’s ambivalent leadership and a law that pays $926 million of the U.S. debt but only if the United Nations takes steps to eliminate waste, a condition many diplomats consider unwarranted micromanaging.
Canada’s ambassador, Robert Fowler, acknowledged that the United Nations has 8,000 bureaucrats, but chided the Congress for having more than 30,000 employees. “We have overlap and duplication, and so do you,” said Fowler.
The administration has agreed with Congress to try to lower U.S. payments to the United Nations, another demand that has rankled. Member nations, including some of Washington’s closest allies, were angered that the United States was making such demands when it was violating treaty obligations that it pay its dues on time and in full.
But diplomats are grudgingly considering Washington’s positions because they realize the United Nations cannot effectively exist without the United States.
“We are not persuaded by your arguments, but by our own enlightened self-interest,” said Peter van Walsum, the Dutch ambassador.
“The UN is looking to the United States for the same thing that the states were looking to King George [for] and didn’t get: the right balancing between representation and taxation,” said Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s representative.
But membership is a two-way street, the diplomats reminded the senators, who sat with the diplomats around a long rectangular table in the committee’s main hearing room.
“The United States is the only superpower, but you cannot manage everything without the other countries of the world,” said Wang Yingfan, China’s ambassador.
The Security Council members visited Capitol Hill to reciprocate for a trip to New York by Helms in January, when he offered an olive branch to diplomats, but in a mailed fist. At that meeting, Helms asserted that Congress had the right to dictate conditions for the payment of U.S. debts to the group.
Thursday, Helms was anything but antagonistic, playing the courtly Southern host and absorbing verbal body blows that the ambassadors flung with quiet aplomb, and not hinting at anger. “He said what he had to say in New York,” said Helms’ spokesman, Marc Thiessen.
The atmosphere at Thursday’s sequel session was more diplomatic and good-humored than in the encounter in Manhattan.
As Thursday afternoon’s 21/2-hour meeting was preparing to adjourn, Fowler of Canada said Helms could make an immediate contribution to a more efficient UN.
“Could we have one of those gizmos?” Fowler said, pointing to the tricolor timing lights that the committee uses to alert speakers when their allotted time is finished. “That would streamline Security Council meetings.”