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My father was a hard taskmaster and disciplinarian. On the top of his agenda during my childhood was education. This and sports achievement are what allowed him to make a contribution to the world community, despite coming from a background that did not have a great deal of financial resources. He continually drummed into us the importance of education, hard work and achievement to the best of one's abilities. He believed that in spite of the prejudices in society, with dedication, perseverance and hard work, one could do anything one wanted to with life. I will never forget a call from him one Sunday morning while I was at Colby College. He said he had called the previous evening only to learn that I was out at a party. He said that he could not understand why I was out partying on a Saturday night when I certainly was not receiving top grades. At first, I thought he was joking, but I soon found out that he certainly was not! Striving to get the best education and grades possible was of the utmost importance to his view of life and its possibilities.
My second recollection was his belief in the equality of race and gender, and that all people were created equal and with hard work could achieve whatever they set out to achieve. He would not tolerate prejudice of any kind or any form of bigotry-a characteristic he shared with my wife.
I recall the marches with Martin Luther King, even when his health was severely faltering, and the incident with the West Side Tennis Club, which was front page news in The New York Times. We had moved into a house in Kew Gardens, Queens with the monies from the Nobel Prize and I was taking lessons at the Club, where the United States Tennis Open was held annually. We applied for regular membership and I was accepted, but surprisingly only as an honorary member. This, it turned out, was because at that time there were no black American members. Of course, my father turned down the offer and the negative publicity the Club received quickly helped to change its restrictive policies, but on principle we never joined. I was one of the first black Americans at a number of schools I attended: Trinity, Choate and Colby College. Although we never talked about it, I have always thought that this was another of my Dad's ways of taking a stand on discrimination and bigotry.
Africa was always central to my father's existence; one of the high points of my early life was meeting one of his great friends, Jomo Kenyatta, in his residence in Kenya. I was scheduled one summer to go with my father to the Congo; however, because of the disturbances, our trip together was put off. If my father had been alive today, he would have been disappointed that the African continent has not progressed as quickly as it seemed possible in the sixties, and he would be working tirelessly to try to ensure that its economic and social plight narrowed for the benefit of Africa and its people, and equally for the health and safety of the more developed world. My father believed strongly that the African continent had a great deal to contribute to this world. One only has to reflect on the importance of a figure such as Nelson Mandela to many of the people of the world to see this. (I am one of the many who hope to have the privilege of shaking his hand one day.)
My father had a strong belief in the strength of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the fifties, when the political realities were quite different from those of today. I continue to believe that my father would strongly argue for the merits of the UN peacekeepers if outbreaks and wars are to continue to be minimized. The world is certainly a better place today despite our current problems, and the peacekeeping forces have made their contribution in the past and certainly will in the future. Unfortunately, they have not been called on in Iraq, but as the balance of powers continue to shift in the future, I am certain peacekeepers will continue to play their role in making our world a safer place. Some people may think that the United Nations and its peacekeepers have seen better days, but I am quite sure that my Dad would strongly argue that their time will come again, and quite shortly at that!
Excerpts from remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the bestowing of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Ralph Bunche Award for Diplomatic Excellence to former Secretary of State George Schultz on January 25, 2002 in Washington, D.C.
Ralph Bunche’s pioneering contributions
to the diplomatic profession inspired the Award for Diplomatic Excellence.
... Ralph Bunche set a standard for public service, for professional
integrity and for visionary statesmanship that succeeding generations
of diplomats have aspired to match. It is certain that Ralph Bunche's
high standards of excellence can never, will never, be exceeded.
And I know that I speak not only for myself, but for all Americans, and
especially for African Americans who have chosen to serve in the foreign
service field, when I say that we stand on the shoulders of Ralph Bunche. And
in his time, Ralph Bunche stood shoulder to shoulder with the best of
them in the defense of peace and freedom.
In 1950, the year that Bunche was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he beat
out Winston Churchill and George C. Marshall. Not bad. I
was about 13 years old. I was about 10, 11, 12, 13, when he was
making a name for himself. And I was just a young kid living in
South Bronx , and we didn't have many African American heroes. When
Don McHenry made a reference to the social conditions in Washington,
he meant not just the social conditions in Washington, but what it was
like to be a black person in America at that time. We had Jackie
Robinson, for only three years at that point. We had Joe Louis. Great
athletes. And there was a general by the name of Benjamin O. Davis
who had served with black troops in World War II. But we had never
seen anything like Ralph Bunche. He transcended it all. I
remember it. I remember when he got the Nobel Peace Prize. I
was 13.
Now, I'm not saying I followed in his footsteps or he was a role model
for me, but he showed what the possibilities might be, and he was an
inspiration to us all. You didn't have to be an athlete; you could
be somebody who could walk with giants on the face of the earth and represent
your country, and the color of your skin made no difference. It
was an inspiration to all of America , and especially African Americans
and young African Americans.
The diplomatic feat for which Ralph Bunche received the Prize was, of
course, negotiating the 1949 armistice between Egypt and Israel , an
agreement which led to similar accords with Lebanon , trans-Jordan and
Syria. Without question, Bunche's achievements saved the lives
of many, many thousands of Arabs and Jews. I derive consolation
from Ralph Bunche's success, as did George Shultz and every one of us
who struggled to keep the great scales of history tipped toward peace
in the Middle East.
Today, Dr. Bunche would be happy to know that Israel has permanent peace
treaties with Jordan and Egypt, but he would be sad to know that the
violence between Israelis and Palestinians has not ended. And if
I know anything about Ralph Bunche, he would urge our administration
and leaders all over the world to work every single day to get the parties
to stop the bloodshed and get them back to the negotiating table, and
that is what we are trying to do every day.
Reading the accounts of Ralph Bunche's Middle East efforts, you can't
help but conclude that he accomplished the impossible. He did it
by superhuman exertions of intellect, skill, patience and will. That
and optimism -- an item that is never in great supply in that part of
the world. Bunche's optimism was at its most undaunted especially
when others thought it was least warranted. Optimism was a negotiating
tactic for Bunche, as well as a true reflection of the man himself. And
it worked. Indeed, as he confronted every tough challenge of his
personal and professional life, Ralph Bunche acted on his deeply held
conviction that every human being has the capacity to overcome obstacles
and to change the world for the better.
Despite the perils of our age, this is a time of extraordinary opportunity,
a time that warrants optimism worthy of Ralph Bunche. In these
opening decades of the 21st century, democratic and economic freedoms
can combine with advances in technology to lift tens of millions of people
out of poverty and onto the path of development.
I would like … to recall a couple
of passages from the book on the life of Ralph Bunche written by Sir
Brian Urquhart, who was a friend, a protégé, a successor,
a biographer of Bunche.
He recalls two instances related to the life of Ralph Bunche and his
own country and the State Department. They are efforts on the part
of the United States Government to persuade Bunche, who had been in the
State Department during that period leading up to the negotiations and
the planning for the United Nations, to come back.
On May 25th, 1950, prior to Bunche's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize,
and indeed prior to the announcement, President Truman asked Bunche to
come to the White House, at which time he sought to persuade him to accept
the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Near East, South Asia and
Africa. Bunche was as forthright as the person who asked him on
that occasion, and he turned down the offer. He explained to the
President, and later to the press, that he did not again wish to live
in the social conditions then existing in Washington.
A few years later, President Eisenhower offered Bunche, by now a Nobel
Laureate and world acclaimed, the position of Deputy to Henry Cabot Lodge
at the US Mission to the United Nations. Bunche, according to Urquhart,
is said to have, and I quote, "politely declined."
Circumstances do change. The State Department today honors Ralph
Bunche in the fact that the library is the Ralph Bunche Library. Were
he here tonight, Ralph Bunche would be appropriately reserved; he was
always reserved. But he would be inwardly delighted on this occasion,
and the delight would have nothing to do with the fact that ultimately
we are honoring Ralph Bunche. He would be delighted that, as a
person who became known as a soldier without enemy, that the person who
is to make this Award is a warrior for peace. [McHenry is referring to
Secretary of State Colin Powell.]
Excerpts from comments made at the conference, “Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times,” Panel I: “Bunche’s Intellectual Interests and Academic Career” held at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center on 5 and 6 May 1986.
When in 1927, Bill Hastie returned to his second year at Harvard Law School, John P. Davis entered that law school, and I began my junior year at Harvard College, we heard of a new black graduate student from Los Angeles who was due to arrive shortly. His advance notices were rave and he lived up to them. We lived in close proximity and had almost daily contact, both in playing cards with a strict time schedule, discussing what university students talk about, and reserving the weekends for serious bull sessions, were race relations and strategies for attacking the color line were the dominant themes. . . . Bunche was extremely attractive, quite vocal, articulate and approachable. He made male and female friends with ease and charm, and he had a well-developed sense of humor, which embraced the capacity to laugh at himself. What impressed me most about Ralph in those days was his optimism. I soon realized that it was not rooted in wishful thinking, as was often the case, but rather based on a long history of overcoming obstacles and an uncanny ability to produce stupendous amounts of work over long sustained periods of application. I watched this capacity grow in proportion to the critical nature of the issues. It maximized the impact of his knowledge, the brilliance of his personality, and was in my opinion the chief factor in his spectacular career. (P.6)
"Ralph Bunche, the Human Being and the International Statesman"
Excerpt from Ralph Bunche: the Man and His Times Edited by Benjamin Rivlin, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990
As one who is not a political scientist
nor a student or practitioner of diplomacy, I would have to content myself
with sharing my observations and experiences with Ralph Bunche as the
human being whom I first met when I was an undergraduate student at Howard
University in the 1930's.
Howard University at that time was a part of the dynamic struggle for
a positive transition from the injustices inherent in and indicated by
the Great Depression. As I recall, the university environment as a whole
as caught up in the ferment of concern for social, economic, and racial
justice. As a student of social science, philosophy, and social psychology,
I could not escape the awareness that my education was not being restricted
to the assignments and discussions in the classroom, but that I was being
influenced by the permeating concerns and struggles for social justice
that dominated the campus. In spite of the fact that the social and economic
issues reflected in the dynamic politics of the Roosevelt New Deal were
the more overt, it is clear, looking back on those times, that the seeds
of a legal and constitutional attack on racial segregation were being
sown in the intellectual soil of Howard University . The embryo of the
civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was being formed at that
time.
It was during this period that I came to know and admire and respect
Ralph Bunche, the scholar, but above all the model of a human being who
by his total personality demonstrated that disciplined human intelligence
and courage were most effective instruments in the struggle for social
justice. ( pp. 211-12)
Ralph Bunche’s influence on my social growth, insight, and incorrigible
struggle for racial justice was both general and specific. An outstanding
example of Bunche as a sensitive human being, who affected me personally
and probably determined my destiny, was the fact that he, almost single-handedly,
saved me from being expelled or suspended from Howard University in my
senior year. As editor of the student newspaper, I was one of the leaders
of a group of students who picketed the restaurant in the Capitol building,
which at that time (1935) did not served Negroes. As would be expected,
we were arrested, and our confrontation with that racial injustice was
well publicized. Mordecai Johnson, president of the university, believed
that by our brash act we had jeopardized the congressional appropriation
upon which the university depended. He demanded that we be brought before
the faculty disciplinary committee. Bunche was a member of that committee,
and he argued persuasively that we should be rewarded, instead of punished,
for our act. He convinced the majority of the committee, and we were
permitted to remain in school. My personal reward was the beginning of
a close personal relationship with a man whom I had respected as a student
respects an admired professor. From that time he became my friend, adviser,
and confidant. This relationship persisted until the time of his death.
( pp. 212-13)
In my personal contact with and observation of Ralph Bunche over the
many years, I never did see any difference between Ralph Bunche, the
person, the human being, and Ralph Bunche, the public figure, the statesman,
the Nobel Laureate. Buncneh was one of the greatest Americans and an
extraordinary statesman because he was a profoundly empathic humanitarian.
He was incapable of flamboyance, even temporary egoism and posturing.
He was concerned with the task at hand and his possible contribution
to the attainment of the desired objectives. In seeking to understand
Bunche beyond my own observations and contacts, I came across one of
the notes he wrote, and which I tried to fit into my view of him:
I have come in contact with a good many celebrated and occasionally great
people. But as one comes to know them, they all have surprisingly apparent
frailties and quite frequently serious flaws of character and personality.
Greatness, more often than not, is the product of a combination of ability
and the accident of time and circumstances.
As I tried to understand Bunche’s view of his fellow human beings
who achieved a reputation of greatness, I saw that Bunche did not see
himself as perfect. He saw himself as a human being with frailties and
flaws of character, but he did not permit them to dominate; they did
not determine his relationship with and his concern for the welfare of
his fellow human beings. In defining greatness as “a combination
of ability and accidents of time and circumstances,” he placed his
own greatness in a perspective beyond the shadow of his ego.
This breadth of perspective may be a key to understanding the ability
of Ralph Bunche to face with quiet calm and dignity the anticommunist
attacks against him during the McCarthy period. Because of his wise and
balanced respect for himself and fellow human beings, Bunche could not
retreat from his pursuit of the goals of peace, justice, and equality.
He had the courage and the clarity to see that these goals were inextricable
and could not be reserved for some and denied to others. This combination
of humanitarianism and statesmanship requires for Bunche a continuing
recognition beyond the Nobel Prize. (P. 214)
"Ralph Bunche at Howard University"
Excerpt from The Crisis, January 1972, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
These memories go back over forty
years, but most are still vivid, and though inadequate and undocumented,
should bear witness to the kind of man Ralph Bunche was.
When I met Ralph on the Howard campus in 1929, I was struck, as so many
were, by his warm friendliness. I had already heard of his athletic and
scholarly attainments. His ability was recognized early at Howard; and
he served for one year as assistant to President Mordecai Johnson. More
important was his leadership of his colleagues and his work in the classroom.
Ralph was one of the driving forces in a group of young faculty members
who were determined to make Howard a first-class university. Abram L.
Harris, Emmett Dorsey, F. Franklin Frazier and Harold Lewis were some
of the members of this group; Ralph’s organizational skill was central
to it.
Together with Emmett Dorsey, Ralph developed the Department of Government
into one of the most appealing and cogent departments at Howard. He was
a first-rate teacher; solidly grounded, able to communicate, exacting
but understanding; able to inform, to liberalize, to inspire his students.
Many of these have gone on to successful careers as lawyers, judges,
legislators, officials in municipal, state, and Federal Government, social
workers, and educators. Many have served on Howard’s faculty; at
least four have been Deans. Countless others bear witness to the impact
of this man in the classroom.
Ralph helped organize at Howard a series of significant conferences on
the problems of Negro life. In the days of the New Deal, Ralph’s
home was the center for many gatherings of intellectuals, black and white.
He was close to such members of the Black Cabinet as Bill Hastie and
Bob Weaver. He was sought out for the kind of knowledge and viewpoint
seen in his trenchant World View of Race (1936) and his “Disfranchisement
of the Negro.” a paper read before the American Political Science
Association in 1940.
Ralph interrupted his teaching often with travels for research; once,
in 1931, on a Rosenwald Fellowship in Europe and Africa and five years
later on a Social Science Research Council Fellowships.
Ralph’s knowledge and understanding were, of course, invaluable
to his study, but what was also striking was his industry. I remember
asking him the secret of his endurance once after he and his assistant,
Bill Bryant (now District Court Judge), had stayed up all night completing
a monograph. He explained it casually, “you just get numb and keep
on.”
But Ralph could play, and he played hard, too. A colleague after a faculty
set-to, once accused him of “athleticism”; that is, a too great
will to win. Ralph did play to win; he asked no quarter and gave none,
but he always played fair. I knew him as a tennis player, both court
and table, as a tireless but cagey retriever, letting his opponent lead
himself, or jumping in at the right chance. He maintained his love of
athletics; when the duties of his office and other pressures prevented
his attending games, he was an avid listener to the radio or spectator
of the television set.
Ralph was never reconciled to the Negro’s being relegated, in his
words, “to the basement of society.” I remember serving with
him on committees protesting discrimination by department stores and
theatres; I remember walking picket lines with him. To his colleagues
and students he continually urged the resoluteness to “keep on moving
until the Negro’s goal of complete and unequivocal equality is attained.”
He had a great sense of humor. He was a skilled raconteur. He frequently
used anecdotes in his lectures, and his tales were broad and ironic,
most often with social point. I remember autobiographic episodes: his
tough boyhood experiences in Detroit and Albuquerque ; a teacher’s
belated concession about Ralph’s exclusion from his high school’s
honor society, though he had finished valedictorian; an experience with
Gunnar Myrdal in the deepest South where Gunnar’s candid questioning
of a Confederate daughter forced them to leave town suddenly. He had
a great store of these yarns that made for both laughter and thought.
There are so many sides to this complex personality who lived so full
a life. One final side must be mentioned: that is, his strong sense of
family, his devotion and dedication as grandson, brother, husband, father,
and grandfather.
Those of us at Howard University who knew Ralph Bunche as teacher, or
colleague and friend, were fortunate in knowing him. For over a decade
he was one of us; for much longer he was close to us. He left his ineffaceable
stamp here, and in so many places elsewhere. As we at Howard share in
the grief of the nation and the world, so we join in honoring him for
his achievements and for the kind of man he was.
Ralph Bunche: the Man and His Times
Edited by Benjamin Rivlin, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990
Bunche was a highly pragmatic man with
an ingrained and unshakable integrity and sense of principle. His attention
to detail was awe-inspiring and sometimes irritating until one realized
how often lack of attention to an ostensibly small matter could result
in a large problem. He had the most highly developed sense of personal
responsibility I have ever encountered and was not prepared, however
tired he might be, however dismaying the circumstances, or however late
the hour, to give up until he was convinced that he had done everything
that he could possibly do. He was determined, often obstinately so, calm,
and prepared to take personal risks if he believed them to be necessary.
His efforts in Palestine , in the Congo , and in Yemen entailed considerable
physical risks, which he always minimized. He insisted on being awakened
at night if an important message came in from the field and on taking
personal responsibility for dealing with it.
Bunche’s authority, and the immense confidence he inspired, derived
from these qualities, but also from his personality. He was very direct
and straightforward in his professional dealings, although discreet to
the point of taciturnity in public and with the press. Everyone knew
that he would never take personal advantage or try to take credit, and
that he would never deceive or betray anyone. He could be very tough,
in a kindly way, in his dealings with subordinates whom he thought were
getting out of line. This was necessary sometimes with military commanders
who believed they knew best and could not appreciate the political complexity
and repercussions of actions or attitudes taken by peacekeeping operations
in the field.
Over and above all, Bunche was a man of extraordinary kindness and compassion.
He never turned his back on those in trouble, He believed strongly in
the potential goodness of human beings, provided they were given the
right conditions to behave properly and to make decisions. He devoted
his life to create those conditions and to setting an unmatched example
of international service.
He attended the San Francisco Conference of 1945 with Dr. Bunche.
It was by a lucky roll of the dice that
this wet-behind-the-ears recent college graduate became an intern in
the Office of International Security and Organization in the Department
of State in 1944. Thus, Ralph Bunche became my first supervisor, my mentor,
and a beloved friend.
Others have written about Ralph Bunche’s achievements in a rich
and varied career. This “remembrance of Ralph” will try to
spotlight some of the characteristics that helped.
He was determined, even stubborn, in pursuing his interests and beliefs.
When he made his mind up, he was immovable. One time, perhaps when he
was at the center of contention over the Congo affair in the early 1960s,
he said that if he was not receiving flak from both sides in a dispute,
he knew he was not achieving much.
I’d had an earlier exposure to his doggedness. The first assignment
Dr. Bunche gave me as an intern was to compare the experience of two
very similar dependent territories. One, Western Samoa, was administered
by New Zealand under a League of Nations mandate. The other, its near
neighbor American Samoa, was an out and out colony of the United States.
Later I realized that this assignment paralleled the research he had
conducted many years earlier for his Harvard PhD dissertation. That work
had compared the experience of two West African colonies, both administered
by France, one under League of Nations mandate, and the other a colonial
possession. My assignment, implicitly, was to test his belief that colonial
powers could not be relied on to serve the best interest of the colonial
peoples under their charge and that, as a result, international supervision
was needed. In the months that followed, his unswerving dedication to
that proposition was in great evidence as the early U.S. wartime plans
for a strong international trusteeship system underwent heavy assault
from the War and Navy Departments seeking unfettered control of the islands
of the Pacific which were to be wrested from Japan.
His stubbornness was reinforced by physical stamina. His description
of how he had concluded the Rhodes armistice agreements to stop the fighting
between Israel and its Arab opponents in 1949 remains etched in my memory.
According to him soon after he returned to the office at Lake Success,
it had been simple. In the spartan conditions of the conference site
on the island of Rhodes, all the participants, including himself, had
been severely stricken with dysentery. As chair, he would not adjourn
the meeting. He kept the negotiators at it, and because he was tougher,
he outlasted them. Agreement was necessary to end the torture, and that
reality overcame the reasons that had until then stood in the way. Thus,
according to its recipient, was the Nobel Peace Prize won.
No doubt that outcome benefited from Dr. Bunche’s formidable skills
as a draftsman. Success in diplomacy often requires the ability to identify
the intersecting interests of adversaries, and to find the mutually acceptable
words to reflect such agreements. Many have commented on how gifted Dr.
Bunche was in this respect. He was extremely perceptive in understanding
the needs of the bargainers and identifying where they intersected, and
remarkably agile in crafting the verbal formulas to give effect to such
agreements.
A totally insignificant incident first made me aware of his skills in
this respect. The time was early 1946. The place was London. The setting
was the final meeting of the Fourth Committee, which dealt with questions
of trusteeship and non-self-governing territories, in the first session
of the UN General Assembly. Dr. Bunche represented the United States
in the absence of the delegate, John Foster Dulles. Though many of the
issues the committee dealt with had been contentious, it had made its
way through the entire session without having had a divided vote. That
astonishing record was on the verge of breaking down because a disagreement
of no real consequence had arisen between the Soviet delegate and others
over how to word an extremely forgettable, and now long-forgotten, passage
in the committee’s report to the Assembly. Indeed, hands were already
in the air in response to the chairman’’s anguished call for
a vote. From the back of the room where the U’s were, the United
States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR, came a voice calling “Mr.
Chairman, Mr. Chairman”. It was Ralph Bunche, waving a scrap of
paper on which he had scribbled the bridging language he had worked out
with his neighbors. The Fourth Committee’’s record of consensus
was spared the stain of a contested vote.
His stamina and his ability to work non-stop have been remarked on by
others. He was not above boasting a bit about his prowess. Once, he told
me that, in order to meet a deadline, he typed without a break over an
entire weekend composing a paper for the Gunnar Myrdal project, An
American Dilemma. What he was proudest of was that, to speed up
the exercise, he had used cellophane tape to paste the pages end-to-end
in a long roll, sparing him the waste of time and energy that inserting
pages into the typewriter would have required.
In Washington, race discrimination was a problem that he had learned
to live with, no matter how much it festered under the skin. He could
not eat in most restaurants in that southern town. When we lunched together,
and to avoid the miserable offerings of the State Department cafeteria,
our sole option was the Department of the Interior cafeteria a short
walk away. Its menu is engraved in my innards. Once, in 1944 or 1945,
I ventured to offer him a change, that is, lunch in the Brookings Institution,
then on Jackson Place across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House
and the old State-War-Navy building where our offices were. I had access
to the dining room because the male interns were quartered in the dormitory
on the top floor. The luncheon went smoothly, and I breathed a sigh of
relief. But I was soon summoned to the office of the lady who managed
the place to be told in no uncertain terms that Mrs. Brookings had not
donated the money for the facility in order to have its clientele driven
out by so unseemly a breach of racial etiquette. I don’t believe
I told Ralph about that.
There came a time when Ralph decided he must have a new suit. Our impression
was that Ruth had ordered him to get one. He inquired around, and decided
he could risk going to a men’’s store, somewhere, as I recall,
in the neighborhood of 13th and F Streets. When he returned to the office
with his suit, Ralph said he’d received very dignified and respectful
treatment from the sales clerk who took care of him. That was not the
problem. The problem was that the clerk sized him up and said, “please
follow me sir”, and led him to the section where the suits were
labeled “young men’s stout”. He professed great indignity
over that insult to his shape. He continued to wear proudly the gold
basketball on a chain he had been awarded for his prowess as a student
athlete at UCLA. He did not, however, refrain from ordering me to take
the upper berth——“you’re skinny, Larry”-- when
we shared a compartment on the special train going to the San Francisco
conference in April 1945.
Race was central in a prewar incident Ralph recounted to a group of us.
He recalled that one day he had received a message from the great Negro
singer, Todd Duncan, who was in a very agitated state. The reason was
that he was a member of a company that had been booked to perform “Porgy
and Bess” at the National Theater in Washington and realized too
late that the theater was segregated. He had an Equity contract, from
which he could not escape. Could Dr. Bunche help in any way? Dr. Bunche
could, and did. He assembled a committee of Negro leaders in town and
the group descended on the National Theater management. The conversation
was rough. In the end, the management conceded. They agreed that the
theater would be wide open to all comers for the duration of the “Porgy
and Bess” run. They carried out the bargain to the letter and advertised
the “come one, come all” policy. What ensued, however, was
entirely unexpected. According to Bunche, the members of the committee
were deluged with calls from Negro citizens of Washington who, rather
than present themselves at the box office to obtain their tickets, asked
the committee members to go in their place. Whether he actually said
it or not I cannot now be absolutely sure, but I know that I left that
conversation believing that Ralph Bunche had decided “never again”.
I have always believed that the incident was instrumental in Ralph’’s
view of his role thereafter. He decided that he could better help his
people by showing that a Negro could earn respect and recognition in
the white world than by serving in the front lines of confrontation between
the races. It is consistent with that view that Ralph Bunche was an ardent
Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Why? Because Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella
were achieving in the world of sports respect and recognition paralleling
his own achievements in the world of public service.
Ralph Bunche as I knew him best in his early years of government and
international service, was indefatigable, driven by his beliefs about
how to make the world better, and, at the same time, a very down to earth
human being. He was a teacher. My college-perfect papers came back with
criticisms scribbled up and down the margins and between the lines, occupying
every vacant space on the page. He taught me precision. I felt obliged
to repay his investment in me by taking similar pains with students and
others I supervised in the decades that followed. He spoke softly and
never seemed to take himself too seriously, although he spent some of
his Nobel Prize award on a Cadillac. He reached out to people, understood
them better than most, and made friends easily. He never lost sight of
who he was and why he chose a career of public service. He was, as they
say of politicians today, always “on message”. He was the right
man at the right time.
and Director Emeritus of the CUNY Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies
Ralph Bunche's path and mine crossed
for the first time in 1943. I was then a soldier studying in the
United States Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) on North
Africa at the University of Pennsylvania . Bunche was one of the guest
lecturers brought in by the head of the program, Dr. Heinrich (Heinz) Wieschhoff.
(Wieschhoff, an Africanist who worked with Bunche during the war
and later at the United Nations, was killed in the 1961 plane crash in the
Congo along with Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld). I recall the occasion
in the auditorium of the University Museum vividly. Although, I had
recently been graduated from Brooklyn College in New York City , one
of the citadels of progressive liberalism, this was the first time
I was in a class addressed by a black professor. The uniqueness
of the experience was punctuated by the subject of the lecture
- the impact of the war on colonial policies in Africa and the
post-war world, a topic so remote from the world, I and my fellow
soldier-students knew. Bunche opened up new vistas that have remained
with me throughout my life. Less than six months after this lecture,
through the mysterious workings of the United States Army I found myself
assigned to the Africa Section in the Research and Analysis (R & A)
Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by Ralph Bunche.
Properly deferential to my chief, I addressed him as Dr. Bunche in my
contacts with him. After a day of "doctoring" him, Bunche told
me to "cut out this doctor business" and to please call him "Ralph." This
was characteristic of Bunche's innate tendency to put people at
ease, his aversion to pomposity and the lack of affectation that
was evident throughout his life. Basically, I recall Bunche as a modest
unpretentious person who never sought the limelight.
Among my many recollections of Ralph Bunche, one stands out especially.
In August 1944, Bunche was no longer with OSS but was at the time a member
of the State Department team at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, hammering
out the preliminary outlines of the United Nations Charter. Although
he was no longer our chief, the R & A staff kept close contact with
him. Our secretary, Laura “Rosie” Rosenthal was concerned that
as Bunche’s family was away at the seashore he had to fend for himself,
particularly for meals. She thought it would be a good idea if she and
I invited Ralph to go out to dinner with us. Bunche agreed and told us
that he would pick us up after his day’s work was done at
Dumbarton Oaks. It then dawned upon “Rosie” and me that
because Washington was a Jim Crow town, we had a problem.
Both of us thought of a number of places we might try. But Ralph preempted
us. As soon as we got into the car, he said “Let’s go to Gateway.” The
Gateway was a restaurant in Union Station, which was not subject to Washington ’s
segregation laws. Bunche was well aware of this, for when in 1941, he joined
the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the precursor of
the OSS, in its offices at the Library of Congress, the staff took advantage
of Union Station’s proximity to the L of C and of the Gateway’s
unsegregated status, to often go there for lunch with Bunche. To me this
incident is impressed in my memory as an example of the indignities Bunche,
as a black American, had to put up with in our nation’s capital.
“I had the pleasure of meeting Ralph Bunche on several occasions during the Civil Rights Movement. One of these occasions was the Selma March. Another was when Martin Luther King, Jr. and I went to see Bunche at the UN in New York just before we departed for Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. On these occasions Bunche gave Martin and me wise counsel and invaluable insights into various international issues. When you look at Bunche’s career in the UN, most of the papers written on the establishment of the UN and the decolonization of Africa were drafted by him. In fact, I believe that Bunche shaped the UN in the period from 1940 to 1965. Bunche’s work in the United Nations on Human Rights and decolonization issues helped to establish a global framework that made possible the legacies achieved by Martin Luther King in the US and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Overall, his contributions to mankind and the international family have been monumental, but he did not want to take credit for his achievements, including the acceptance of the Nobel Prize. Bunche will always be remembered as a champion of democracy and as a true citizen of the human race.”
I read with considerable interest the
article on Ralph Bunche ("On Israel's 50th, pausing to remember
a peacemaker," May 27). It was a fitting tribute to a highly respected
American diplomat, a dedicated international public servant and a fine
human being.
Although, as Lewis suggests, this Nobel laureate may not be accorded
today the recognition he deserves for his mediation in the Arab-Israeli
conflict on 1948, Bunche is well-remembered and highly honored here at
Howard University for that as well as for his many other achievements.
His impact lives on in many different areas, and he continues to inspire
young men and women here on a daily basis.
In proud recognition, the university has named one of its newest facilities
in his honor. The Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center carries
his name and also emulates the spirit of this great American diplomat.
The center provides the focus for interdisciplinary studies in the area
of international programs at Howard. On of its major goals is to educate
African American youth and other people of color for leadership and service
to our nation and global community.
Our department of political science owes much to Bunche, who helped organize
it in 1928. He was chairman of that department when he was called to
diplomatic service by the U.S. Department of State in 1941. In keeping
with his interest and insistence of universality, the department has
a faculty of unparalleled ethnic variety, which provides expertise on
areas as diverse as the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Because of Bunche and others who followed in the footsteps of this
formidable African American Scholar and statesman, Howard has become
an outward-looking institution fully engaged in national-security issues
and in a wide variety of international programs spanning the globe.
I first met Ralph Bunche in 1944, when I was Canadian ambassador to Washington and he had just become the first Negro with an important"desk job" at the State Department. Our long friendship began with the mutual discovery that we both were ardent sports fans. Sometime later, after we both went to the U.N. (where he became an Under Secretary-General of the organization), I watched him listening intently at an Assembly debate one afternoon, knowing full well that his translation earphones were wired to a World Series baseball broadcast. I knew it because he was passing the scores to me.
From his office on the 38th floor of Manhattan's U.N. Secretariat, Bunche viewed our imperfect world in the light of his own admitted biases. "I have a deep-seated bias against hate and intolerance," he once said, "a bias against war, a bias for peace. I have a bias which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble."
Although he claimed that color was irrelevant to his job as a peacemaker, it may in fact have been a key factor: as an American black man with tolerance, learning and experience, he was open to men and ideas of every shade. And while his life as a Negro made him personally tough, it seemed also to have given him a generous and perceptive understanding that others could sense.
During the Nigerian civil war, for example, three Biafran students invaded his U.N. office one day and began a sit-in. Security guards came to throw them out, but Ralph wouldn't permit such violence. "I've done this sort of thing myself," said Bunche, who'd taken part in civil rights demonstrations, "so you can feel at home here. But don't mind if I go on with my work." And so, after ordering sandwiches for the hungry protesters, he calmly dictated letters, took phone calls and carried on as usual. Hours later, the three intruders finally left - peacefully. "Those are good kids," Bunche said later. "They care."
Time and again, events conspired to send Ralph Bunche to the world's trouble spots. After the 1948 Palestine war came the Suez crisis of 1956, when Britain and France joined in an Israeli invasion of Egypt, ostensibly to "stabilize" the Egyptian-Israele border but actually, it was alleged, to restore the Suez Canal to international control. At an emergency session of the General Assembly convened in New York, Ralph Bunche put his finger on the U.N.'s problem: "We've got to find some peaceful way to make the British and French get out of Egypt." What I therefore proposed, and what the Assembly accepted, was the creation of a United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to police a cease-fire and serve as a buffer between Israel and Egypt. The idea wasn't wholly original: Ralph himself had asked the Security Council for international observers to oversee the 1948 cease-fire. But now it was politically acceptable, partly because it gave the British and French a face-saving way out of a dagerous dilemma.
In any case, although I have often been credited with inventing UNEF, its success in preserving the peace for over ten years was largely due to Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, who helped to organize the 6,000-man contingent, recruited from ten countries, and supervised its every move until it was withdrawn just before the Six-Day War of 1967. The work of UNEF was Ralph's most satisfying achievement. "For the first time," he said, "we've found a way to use military men for peace instead of war."
I was appointed a member on the New York City Board of Higher Education, by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, at the same time that he appointed Dr. Ralph Bunche to that Board. I served on the Board from 1958 to 1969, and, upon my resignation to accept the appointment as a federal judge, was named by the Board a Member Emeritus. Dr. Bunche and I became colleagues, fellow members of the governing body for the City’s public colleges, not yet recognized and organized as a University.
Dr. Ralph Bunche became an active and activist member of that Board, which was charged with responsibility for presiding over City College, Queens College, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Hunter College, as well as community colleges in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. Dr. Bunche was a fervent advocate of public higher education in New York City. He talked for it. He fought for it, and he worked at it. This was just before these colleges were united as a University by the action of the New York State legislature. Dr. Ralph Bunche and I strongly supported that development.
President Jimmy Carter in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech quoted Ralph Bunche:
"It is clear that global challenges must be met with an emphasis
on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international
consensus. Imperfect as it may be, there is no doubt that this can best
be done through the United Nations, which Ralph Bunche described
here in this same forum as exhibiting a "fortunate flexibility" -
not merely to preserve peace but also to make change, even radical change,
without violence.
He went on to say: "To suggest that war can prevent war is a base
play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of
any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable
recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence
that war begets only conditions that beget further war."
To view the complete Nobel Lecture please visit the Nobel Foundation
at http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/2002/carter-lecture.html
Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette quoted Ralph Bunche at the United Nations Day ceremony in Ralph Bunche Park on 24 October, 2002.
Today we mark the 57th anniversary of the ratification of the United Nations Charter. We meet in a park dedicated to an American who helped draft the Charter. Ralph Bunche began his career as a pioneering researcher in race studies and civil rights at Howard University, but soon came to the United Nations to serve the cause of peace and equal rights across the world.
Upon Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his efforts to promote peace in the Middle East, Bunche said that “the United Nations exists not merely to preserve the peace but also to make change – even radical change – possible without violent upheaval.” From his work in civil rights in America to his efforts for peace around the world, Bunche knew that radical change was both needed and possible.
Colin Powell Address at City College of New York in Commemoration of the Centenary of Dr. Ralph Bunche
November 10, 2003
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for that very warm CCNY and New York welcome. And Dr. Boudreau and President Williams, I thank you for your gracious welcome and your introduction, and I especially, Greg, thank you for the service that you have rendered to this wonderful institution and to the people of the City of New York since you took the leadership of CCNY just before 9/11 two years ago. Enrollment is up, standards are up, everything is moving in the right direction, and your leadership had a lot to do with that, Greg, and thank you.
I can never come in to the Great Hall without thinking about the two eternal questions in my life that continue to vex me: Why they let me in, and why did they let me out? A "C" student from Morris High School , and when I left here four and a half years later, I was a "C" student from CCNY.
And they were, I think, kind of pleased to see me go. They gave me to the Army and said, "Please, be gone." And now I'm one of the favorite sons of the City College of New York, and very proud of it.
It's always a pleasure and a joy to be back at my alma mater. It's a special joy on this occasion to be able to preside, for the first time as Secretary of State, at an event of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies. I am so pleased that the Center is thriving, and I thank Vince for his leadership. And as you heard earlier, the very first Colin Powell Leadership Fellows are with us this evening, and I offer my congratulations to these eight wonderful youngsters and I look forward to seeing each of them a little bit later on in the evening's activities.
The Center's programs are moving ahead with dispatch, and I'm so pleased at the level of cooperation that exists with the Foreign Policy Association, and I thank Noel Lateef for what he doing. And I want to say a special word of thanks for the May & Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, which has provided such generous support to the Center since it was created some five years ago. And I'm so pleased this many members of the Rudin family are here with us this evening -- Jack, Lewis, everyone. Thank you.
Another program here that I'm proud of is the Maud and Luther Powell America 's Promise Scholarship program, which was endowed for my parents, is also thriving and brings me great satisfaction.
It's a special honor, though, to be asked to present a lecture in honor of Dr. Ralph Bunche during the centenary of his birth. As Greg noted, Dr. Bunche was a remarkable man. He was a great scholar. He was a tireless worker for civil and human rights. He was a diplomat par excellence of both the State Department and of the United Nations, and winner -- the first time for a black person -- of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.
I was just a boy then. I was 13 years old in 1950 when Dr. Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize. When he came back from Oslo , the City of New York threw a tickertape parade for him. I remember it very well and I remember reading all about his exploits and his achievements.
Back in those days, celebrity heroes for young black kids were mostly musicians, entertainers and athletes, wonderful people like Nat King Cole or Jackie Robinson or Joe Louis. And there was also one black general that we knew about, General Benjamin O. Davis.
But Ralph Bunche was something different, quite unlike everyone else. He was brilliant. He was a Ph.D. He had taught at Howard University and he had taught at Harvard University . And he was hands-on. He had worked during World War II in that famous intelligence agency, the OSS . And then he was tapped to become an Assistant Secretary of State, a very rare thing for a person of color.
The very existence of a man like Ralph Bunche opened our minds up there in the Bronx . He showed us that there was more to hope for, more to work for, than perhaps we had ever thought. We could be smart, we could be brilliant, and we could matter, just as Ralph Bunche mattered. There were new ways, therefore, for us perhaps to make our parents proud of us, maybe one day to make our children proud of us as well.
Ralph Bunche was not foremost in my mind, however, when I first set foot on this campus about four years after that tickertape parade. My parents were on my mind. I knew that all my parents' hopes, all of their dreams, all of their aspirations, were bound up in their children. And that they believed education to be the key to making their dreams for us come true.
As you heard, my parents came to America from Jamaica . They were immigrants, like all of our parents were at one time. They worked hard, they saved and went without, all so that my sister and I would be educated. And so that we would in due course be able to educate our children, both for material success and for its own sake. For the love of learning, and the refinement that learning brings to our lives and brings to our society.
Ralph Bunche knew the value of education, too, far more than most people. But here's something you may not have known about Dr. Bunche. At a critical point in his education, he was awarded a scholarship, the Rosenwald Fellowship, which he held at Harvard in 1932 and 1933.
That scholarship, which enabled Ralph Bunche to do dissertation research abroad, was not only critical to his doctoral degree. It opened his eyes to the world. It set the course for his remarkable career.
Now you can see why the Powell Center , and especially the Maud and Luther Powell America 's Promise Scholarships, mean so much, so very, very much, to me. These scholarships, and others like them, are keys for young people to a better future. I know that there are future Ralph Bunches in the CCNY student body. Some of them are probably sitting in this hall tonight. Some may be among the eight that we mentioned earlier. There are future Ralph Bunches elsewhere in this country, and for that matter, all around the world. All waiting for and wanting an education.
There's an old story about a man by the name of George Ellis whose job it was, back in 1908, 1909, to clean up every day. He was a janitor. He cleaned up after a remarkable man by the name of Daniel Chester French. He was the man who carved that wonderful and giant statue of Abraham Lincoln that sits at the center of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington . And every day, that old man swept up the granite rubble that the sculptor's work produced every evening, barely exchanging more than a "hello" or a "good evening" with Mr. French as the artist left for the day and George arrived to do his work. But George Ellis watched, and watched every single day, every week, every month, as Mr. French continued his work.
And late one afternoon, when the sculptor was nearly done with Mr. Lincoln, the old man said: "Mr. French, can I ask you a question?" "Certainly", said the sculptor, "What is it?" George said, "Well, what I want to ask, sir, is how you knew all along that Mr. Lincoln was sittin' inside that block of granite?"
It was not a silly question. It was a profound question about how to recognize potential and how to chisel that potential into being, how to chisel it into reality.
In our case, education is the chisel. That's what CCNY does: it recognizes potential, and it works to carve that potential into a living reality. As you all know, CCNY was founded in 1847 "to provide higher education for the children of the working class." The children of the blue-collar laborers. The children of the immigrants. And what a job it's done and what a job it continues to do.
My class, just celebrating its 45th anniversary, produced doctors and lawyers and technicians and scientists, nurses, teachers, and among other callings it produced soldiers, soldiers like me and soldier classmates of mine who gave their lives in the service of their country. I am very proud, so very proud, of my alma mater. And I am proud to be the son of a city and state that knew the value and importance of educating all its citizens. Once again, I say to New York , thank you, thank you.
As we meet here tonight, on this Veterans Day eve, another generation of soldiers is serving this nation in far-flung places around the world and in two active combat theaters, Iraq and Afghanistan .
We went to Afghanistan two years ago to defeat the al-Qaida murderers who destroyed the World Trade Center and left a hole in the heart of this wonderful city. We went to remove the despotic Taliban regime that gave al-Qaida sanctuary and allowed their country to be used as a mass production platform for worldwide mass-casualty terrorism.
That terrible regime is now gone and al-Qaida is on the run and in hiding. A new government, led by a gifted man, President Hamid Karzai, is hard at work. It is putting in place a new political system resting on a foundation of democracy. Afghanistan 's society will be faith-based, but it will allow participation in civil life of all citizens, including women, especially women.
Afghans have just finished drafting a new constitution. It will be voted on later this year and will lead to elections next year.
The Afghan economy is starting to rebound. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have returned to their homeland. The infrastructure of the country is being rebuilt. The international community is speeding up its financial contributions to help the people of Afghanistan succeed in rebuilding their country.
Yes, there are still dangers there, to be sure. Taliban remnants want to turn the clock back. They don't like what they see. They don't want to see their country moving in this direction. Some regional leaders are still resisting the central government. The former will be dealt with, the latter will also be dealt with, but they both have to know that Afghanistan is going to be moving forward. Much more work needs to be done, but so much has been accomplished in the two short years since we have been helping President Karzai and his people. We should be so proud of what we have done, what we have done to give hope to the Afghan people.
And we haven't done it alone. Dozens of countries are working alongside us as partners in this vital work. NATO has taken over security responsibility for the capital city of Kabul . Other nations have sent troops to join U.S. troops in securing the countryside. The United Nations has played an indispensable role. If, as some critics charge, American policy is "unilateral," it certainly is the funniest kind and the weirdest kind of unilateralism I have ever seen when I look at how the international community is working together in Afghanistan .
Nevertheless, the reality is that the American GI -- their presence -- is the backbone of this effort. Thousands of wonderful young men and women, your fellow citizens, are serving so well, serving with such distinction. And they're serving for a simple purpose: to bring freedom and peace to people who have not known such freedom and peace for decades. This is America at its very best.
In Iraq tonight, over 130,000 American troops are serving with equal distinction. Another despotic regime is gone. Saddam Hussein, along with his cabal of thugs and murderers, had gassed their own people. He filled mass graves. I've seen those graves. He tortured and mutilated people. I've seen some of them. He invaded his neighbors and he gassed them, too. He consorted with terrorists and he himself is a terrorist. He squandered his nation's wealth for over 35 years on weapons and on palaces. He was a threat to the region. He invaded those neighbors. He was a threat to the world. The UN warned him for 12 years, repeatedly, to no avail.
President Bush would not ignore the threat and acted, and he acted in concert with over 30 other nations.
Remnants of the old regime remain to be defeated. They cause us casualties on a regular basis. They are attacking our troops, troops who are there to restore peace to a people who desperately want peace. All they want is a chance to rebuild their own country -- a country that will be based on democracy, a country that will have a desire to live in peace with its neighbors. The remnants of this old regime, the terrorists that are moving in, are murdering their fellow Iraqis.
But let there be no doubt about the outcome. The defeat of those remnants is certain. So is the defeat of terrorists from abroad who are coming to Iraq to visit their hatred and fear of progress on the Iraqi people and those who are trying to help them. We will find them wherever they are. And they will be destroyed.
In the meantime, we're not just standing still. The work of reconstruction goes on. The Coalition Provisional Authority, under Ambassador Bremer, is working with the Iraqi Governing Council to build a democracy. Groundwork is being laid for the drafting of a new constitution. Iraqis are taking on added security responsibilities. Democratic town councils are being formed. And we are working as hard and fast as we can to prepare Iraqis to resume full sovereignty over their country.
UN Resolution 1511, supporting our approach, was passed by the Security Council unanimously last month. The recent $20 billion supplemental passed by Congress, and the $13 billion pledged at the Madrid conference just two weeks ago show that the international community, so fractured over the issue of going to war, is now coming together to build the peace. This is as it should be, and as it must be for, ultimately, the form of an Iraqi government must be acceptable to Iraqis, to Iraq 's neighbors and to the international community at large.
There is no question that we are being tested in Iraq . We're being tested politically as well as militarily. It is a test that we must and will win. We will win. Of that, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
Afghanistan and Iraq are two theaters in the global war on terrorism. President Bush said after 9/11 that this would be a long, difficult and costly war. For the sake of civilization, and for our own security, we must have the patience, we must have the determination to stay the course and pay the price in the certain knowledge that we are doing the right thing. History will be our judge, and we are already sure of history's verdict.
Our success in Afghanistan and Iraq will fundamentally reshape those two connected regions. Afghanistan can become an example to the nations of Central Asia , and Iraq can become a model for the Arab world and the entire Middle East .
Why shouldn't they be? Why should the sweep of democracy and freedom be denied to those nations who would so benefit from joining the sweep of history?
As President Bush said last week at the National Endowment for Democracy, "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time…Our generation has witnessed the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500 year history of democracy." And that advance shows no signs of stopping.
I see that advance of freedom every day as I go about my work as Secretary of State. It is a joy to sit in my office and meet with leaders from countries who, just a few years ago, were imprisoned behind an Iron Curtain or were under some form of dictatorship in other parts of the world. They now all come and visit me as representatives of free nations, asking for partnership, asking for partnership and help in embedding forever in their societies the concepts of freedom, democracy, human rights and market economies. Why do they do that? Why do they come and talk about these issues? Because they learned that these are the values that are going to work in the 21st century.
Last week, I visited Panama and Nicaragua , two countries that 14 years ago, when I was National Security Advisor to President Reagan, were wallowing in dictatorship and despair. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I directed the invasion and liberation of Panama . As National Security Advisor to President Reagan, I supported the Contras and I got money for the Contras in Nicaragua as they tried to overthrow the Sandinista regime.
Ironically, when CCNY some years ago decided to award me an honorary doctorate, it was done in my office at the Pentagon rather than at commencement. The reason for that was a great concern over student demonstrations against what we had done in Panama , the invasion of Panama .
But last Monday, almost 14 years after that invasion, I was warmly welcomed in Panama City , welcomed by a democratically elected president who was getting ready to give up office next year to another democratically elected president. I stood on the reviewing platform with President Moscoso to observe the parade celebrating the 100th anniversary of Panamanian Independence.
A few hours later, I was in Managua , Nicaragua , and my reception by the democratically elected government in Nicaragua was just as warm. As I landed and my plane came to a halt, when I came out of my plane, down to the bottom of the ramp, I stood there at attention as a military band played the Star Spangled Banner.
I hope to come back here to CCNY at some time in the future. And I know that there are young people across the street who are exercising their right to demonstrate, and I admire them, I appreciate that they have these feelings. But I hope that when I come at some point in the future they will recognize that we have given to two more countries the rights to have a democratic form of government, market economies and a system founded on the basic essentials of human rights.
Indeed, we have no choice. History calls us to act on behalf of liberty and freedom, and no one answers such calls like Americans. We always have; we always will. We are answering it now. In his speech last week, President Bush laid out a vision for the whole Middle East . It is a speech that Ralph Bunche would have understood, and he would have applauded.
The United States has put forward a way of approaching the world that is quite different, and Bunche would have understood this perfectly. Ralph Bunche received his Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for getting the Arabs and Israelis to reach an armistice agreement in 1949. It was a dangerous assignment that he had. His predecessor had been assassinated. It was difficult. He had to persevere, to cajole, to shout, and to reason with others. He needed to balance patience with persistence. But he did, and he succeeded.
Over a half a century later now, there's still violence, regrettably, especially between Israelis and Palestinians. American diplomats are still at work trying to stop it.
The United States has put forward a roadmap that can break the spiral of fear and revenge and hatred. That roadmap can put the parties on a path leading to a Palestinian state, living in peace with Israel and all its neighbors. I hope that the new Palestinian government will act to end terrorism, the terrorism that erupts in its midst, end that terrorism so that we can press both parties to march down this road to peace once and for all.
But the President's vision goes beyond just this conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. It goes beyond the efforts we are exerting with our many partners in Afghanistan and in Iraq .
It is a vision of success, not just for Americans and global security, but for the peoples of the Middle East , and of the entire world. That vision is about justice. It is about prosperity. It is about freedom. And it is about, above all, peace.
But what do we mean, more specifically, by success -- and how are we going to achieve it? Let me start explaining it this way.
We have helped to free the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq from the tyrannies that held them down. But even more important, is what we want to free them, and their neighbors, for. We want to help Middle Eastern nations and other nations to prosper, to be independent, and to be free, just as we're doing with Iraq and, in Central Asia , Afghanistan -- to be free and thereby, with that freedom, to enjoy the twin blessings of liberty and peace. And they are indeed twins. For peace invariably comes to us on the wings of liberty.
We want this for its own sake, for the peoples of the Middle East , because it is right and good. But we know these goals also to be in the enlightened self-interest of the United States , its allies and its friends.
We live in a world that is becoming almost entirely seamless with regard to security. There have always been failed and failing states. But until fairly recently, the implications of tyrannies like those of the Taliban and the Iraqi Baath Party were local or at most regional.
The United States , protected by two great oceans and blessed with civilized and friendly neighbors, cared about such tyrannies out of an obligation to our basic sense of humanity. But remote political tragedies and the people who cause them did not directly threaten America .
Now they do. Such people cast their murderous shadow right here in New York City on September 11, 2001 . They cast it that same day on the Pentagon and on a field in Pennsylvania .
Clearly, the nature to the American people of the threats, the nature of the threats to the American people, has changed. The main threat is obvious, or should be. It is the potential for terrorist methods to link up with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But if the threat is new, we also see new opportunities, as well.
And those opportunities are ultimately greater than the threats. The essence of them is what the President spoke of last week: the advance of freedom.
Just as the economic ministers of the world have finally come to a consensus on what works in the world of economic growth, so political thinking and political leaders have come to a consensus on what works in the world of governance. Democracy works. Freedom works. Liberty works.
We cannot persuade everyone on this planet that this is so overnight. It requires of us a generational commitment. And it requires all the tools of American statecraft, and the energies of the American people in their private business activities, their philanthropy, and in their prayers.
As the President emphasized last week, there is nothing inherent in Islam that is anti-democratic, that is anti-freedom.
Indeed, outside of the Arab world, the majority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live in countries with democratic or democratizing governments, with the rule of law firmly established in constitutional foundations.
This reality is spreading. We see it every day. Jordan held historic elections this past summer, building on work started by the late King Hussein. His son, King Abdallah, is just as determined on the issue of reform, and we are determined to help him as much as we can.
As the President noted last week, Qatar has a new constitution. In Oman , the vote has been extended to all adult citizens. In Bahrain , there is now a popularly elected parliament for the first time ever. There is a multiparty political system taking root in Yemen . Saudi Arabia is committed to the gradual introduction of elections, starting at the local level.
Outside the Arab world, too, we see change. The Iranian people want their freedom back, of this there can be no doubt. They do not want to banish Islam from their lives. Far from it. They want to be free of those who have dragged the sacred garments of Islam into the political gutter.
They have been imprisoned for wanting this. They have been gagged for wanting this. They have been intimidated and threatened for wanting this. Some have already died for wanting this. And yet when Shirin Ebadi returned home to Iran just a week or so ago, this year's Nobel Peace Prize in her hands, tens of thousands of Iranians came out to greet her.
We all know what this means. Ralph Bunche certainly would have known what it means. The hidebound clerics of Iran know what it means, too. Should they be worried? Does morning follow night? They should be.
President Bush was exactly right to point out last week the rulers of non-democratic societies in the Muslim world really have only two choices: lead the way to democratic change, or be destroyed by it, be left behind. For the sake of their own people, we hope they choose well.
Why is all this happening? Is it mainly because of public American and Western pressure? No. Is it because we have given secret, threatening orders to the rulers of these and other countries? No. Is it because, by some strange coincidence, a large and growing group of regional leaders have discovered the work of John Locke and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson? Not likely.
It's because the people of these and other countries in the Middle East , and not just the Middle East , because they feel the bracing winds of freedom on their faces. Dictators and despots can build walls high enough to keep out armies, but not high enough to keep those winds from blowing in.
Even those without experience of genuine democratic and constitutional government know in their bones what freedom is all about. They know exactly what equality of opportunity is when they don't have it. They have a deep appreciation of freedom of speech and assembly, because they don't have it and they see the consequences. They know what human dignity is, because Islam exalts it and demands that it be respected, even when those who rule in its name try to take that dignity away.
So reform is welling up in the Arab and Muslims worlds. Every tear shed from the oppression and injustice of decades is now collecting together, building up an ocean of hope -- an ocean whose waves are beginning to slap up against the wharfs of stagnation and injustice.
Momentum for reform is building not least among women and women's groups -- a true barometer of positive change in the Muslim world. And here the vanguard of change is Morocco , where King Mohammed himself is taking the lead.
Indeed, pressure for reform is growing from the Atlantic straight across to the Indian Ocean , from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz . And we hope that the example of a successful and democratic Iraq will add to that pressure.
Liberty and peace are coming to the Middle East , and we want to help that process along. But how exactly to best go about it?
We know where to begin. We take our bearing by recognizing the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. The National Security Strategy of the United States , put forward last September, lists eight such demands of human dignity. They are our lodestone for strategy as we approach the Middle East , and beyond.
Here they are: The rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property.
These are nice sounding words. They are words that move me every time I hear them, and no matter how many times I hear them. But ladies and gentlemen, they are not just words. They form the lodestone of our policies, and we are executing these policies. Some examples.
Last December the President announced the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a program to support educational, economic, legal and political reform throughout the Arab world. Though still a new program, this Partnership is already achieving impressive results.
Its Partnership for Financial Excellence, for example, is helping banks provide credit and financial services to medium and small private enterprises. Success depends on, and demands, the rule of law for this kind of activity.
Its Commercial Law Development Program is providing technical assistance to enhance the protection of property rights. We are building respect for private property.
A few weeks ago, we held our first regional forum on judicial reform in Bahrain . At that forum, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor led a team of American jurists in a series of workshops with the region's most senior judges and justice ministry authorities, a workshop on issues such as human rights and legal procedures. That's how we are promoting the concept and the practice of equal justice before the law.
We have an international visitors program for the Middle East devoted to Women as Political Leaders. This builds capacity for government and leadership in the region, and by so doing engineers respect for women.
We have a program, in partnership with the private sector here and abroad, devoted to the Arabic Early Reading Program. That program encourages independent reading, and with it independent thinking and analysis. We thus encourage the energies that one day will spring forth in free speech.
In Yemen , we have begun a program to link high schools to their American counterparts using the Internet. We are creating a collaborative learning network to benefit both Yemeni and American students.
And by doing so we hope to engender respect for difference, for minorities, and for freedom of worship among people of different religious traditions.
We also seek a free trade area with the Middle East, as the President announced in May, an area that would stretch from Morocco to Iraq, resting on the basic principle of free and open trade. And as we work toward that goal, we are developing free trade arrangements as the opportunities to do so come at hand.
We have a free trade agreement already with Jordan , and in the fairly short time it has been in force trade between Jordan has increased exports to the United States , resulted in increased exports to the United States six-fold. American companies have increased exports to Jordan by more than 30 percent. Jobs have been created both here and in Jordan .
Deep economic reforms in Jordan set the stage for that agreement, showing yet again how economic reform and freer trade work hand-in-hand. Free trade, and the reforms that are prerequisite to it, thus encourage the growth of civil society, and that growth of civil society, in turns, places limits on the absolute authority of the state.
We hope to replicate the pattern we have set with Jordan with Morocco , Bahrain , and other countries as well. And not just in the Middle East . We seek a freer trade and investment climate all around the world.
In February, too, the President announced the birth of the Millennium Challenge Account, a revolutionary change in how we go about stimulating economic development in the world's poorer countries. The MCA, as we call it, takes the form of a contract based on the genius of the free market itself. It is not a charity account but an incentive system for building good governance. Create good governance, good economic and political governance, give your people the tools for their own prosperity, and we will support you generously.
You're not eligible for MCA money because you are not yet on a firm foundation of democracy and human rights? Come talk to us. We will help you. We will show you how to become eligible for these funds.
The MCA applies very much to the Arab world, to the Middle East , and to the developing world beyond. We do all this so that the enormous potential of the Middle East -- I am talking about people, not natural resources -- so that enormous potential will not be frustrated and wasted.
As the President said last week, "The prosperity and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by the extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity -- and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations."
The President is exactly right. Economic and political reform cannot be imposed. It must come from within, from the people themselves freely using tools of their own prosperity. Liberty must be earned. But the friends of liberty can make a loan, so to speak. A loan of experience. A loan of encouragement.
A loan of money, too. The MCA, if fully funded by the Congress, will represent the largest increase in U.S. aid since the Marshall Plan – indeed, it is even bigger than the Marshall Plan.
We're not literally providing loans with the MCA, but grants. We're giving the money away. But we'll get every penny back and more. The dividends will be in dollars in the form of expanded trade. But the dividends will also come in the form of the stability and peace that economic development ultimately encourages, in the Middle East and will also encourage elsewhere. For us, for our own security, that's far more important than just a monetary return on investment.
We've made a good start. But we're still building our policies as appropriate to opportunities as they arise. It will take time. It will not be easy. But we will not stop until we have helped the nations of the Middle East each go through their democratic revolution, their democratic process.
We will not stop because we are inspired by Ralph Bunche. Ralph Bunche never stopped either. He could have just stayed a scholar, or just dedicated himself to educating others. That would've been fine, particularly at a time when so many doors were still closed to him. Everybody would have understood if that's all he did. But he refused to be limited. He went on to serve his country with great distinction as a high State Department official.
I can't help but get a little personal at this point when I think about Ralph Bunche, when I think about the State Department I am privileged to command. To think of the doors that were closed to men of genius like Ralph Bunche. And I think about that and I think about those days, and I think about the great waste of human talent that was caused by prejudice, intolerance and injustice. From the block long balcony on the eighth floor of the State Department, I can walk along and I can look over that balcony and see the most incredible view of downtown Washington . Close by I can see the Lincoln Memorial, where Daniel Chester French and George Ellis had that remarkable conversation back in 1909.
And I can look across the Potomac River and see Virginia . I can see the Custis-Lee mansion above the row of crosses in Arlington National Cemetery . I can see other memorials. I can see houses, apartment buildings, parks and roadways. It looks quite idyllic, and it surely looked that way when Ralph Bunche worked in the State Department. But do you younger members of this audience tonight realize that for a decade and half after Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize, that place across the Potomac that I can see from my office, that state Virginia that Ralph Bunche could also see in those days, was still horribly racially segregated?
There are members of my staff still in their early 50s who grew up over there, who, as I do, remember the two drinking fountains and the three bathrooms at their neighborhood drug store's lunch counter.
Ralph Bunche lived in that time. It is not ancient history to me. It is still of my generation. He overcome all such obstacles. So many of us did. And now those obstacles, for the most part, have gone away. There are other obstacles that are there, but those obstacles are gone. But think of how many men and women of great talent weren't given the chance to overcome. They couldn't. Think of the terrible waste.
Ladies and gentlemen, the forms of social prejudice, intolerance and injustice that still pervade many societies in the Middle East and other places around the world are different in their history, different in their nature, different in their appearance from the crisis of intolerance that marked the days of segregation in this country. But prejudice, intolerance and injustice always have the same effect in the end.
Prejudice destroys human dignity. Intolerance destroys social peace. Injustice destroys hope. All three plant the seeds of fear, resentment and violence. All three destroy the future.
Ralph Bunche refused to give in to such a fate. And he worked his whole life to make sure others didn't have to give in either. We must refuse to give in, as well.
We too must work to change fate -- not just the fate of others, in the Middle East and elsewhere. But through them we'll change our own fate, our own future, for the better, as well.
Yes, Ralph Bunche could have been satisfied with being a high State Department official, but he wasn't. He went on to be a champion of civil rights, and of human rights in his service to the United Nations.
In the mission to spread liberty and peace to the Middle East , we can take a valuable lesson from Dr. Bunche.
Are there dangers? Yes, but that won't stop us. Is it difficult? Very difficult, but that won't deter us. Will we too have to persevere, cajole, shout, and reason with others? You can bet on it. Will we have to balance patience with persistence? No doubt. Will we too succeed? The answer is a resounding yes.
After winning the Nobel Prize, Dr. Bunche could have retired to a life of lecturing and teaching. But instead he helped lead the civil rights movement along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he went back to work for the United Nations as Under Secretary for Special Political Affairs and then Under Secretary General.
Ralph Bunche, throughout that long, distinguished career of his, never stopped trying to help others, never stopped serving others. That's what made him happy. The harder he worked, the happier he became. And he worked up until the day he died.
And so, CCNY family, and especially CCNY students, who I would like to say a special word to, you want to be happy? It's no secret how to do it. Happiness cannot be achieved solely by amassing possessions or power. Real happiness is a by-product of serving others.
So, my young friends, just look around you in this city. In this country. In this Middle East . In this whole big, beautiful, but unfinished world. A lot of people need you. Lots of work needs to be done. Liberty 's work. Freedom's work. Noble work.
Do that work, serve others by it, and you'll be happier than you can imagine. Maybe as happy as Ralph Bunche was when he was helping others. Maybe as happy, in my own smaller way, as I am. Thank you all, very much, and thank you, CCNY.
United Nations
Ralph Bunche Lecture Series
Then and Now: The Bunche Legacy
The United Nations Department of Public Information, in association with the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies of the City University of New York Graduate Center, has arranged a series of three lectures to mark the birth centenary of Ralph Bunche and to honor his legacy. The three seminars are:
• Septembers 4, 2003 from 1:00 to 3:00 pm , workshop on Then and Now: Ralph Bunche and the Question of Palestine.
Keynote Speaker: Deniss Ross
Sir Brian Urquhart, Mr. Edward Mortimer, Under Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor, Dr. Dennis Ross, Dr. Benjamin Rivlin, Dr. Thomas G. Weiss.• November 20, 2003 from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm , workshop on Then and Now, From Ralph Bunche to Lakhdar Brahimi: The Future of Peacekeeping and Mediation.
Keynote Speaker: David Malone• February 5, 2004 from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, workshop on Then and Now: Ralph Bunche and the Integrity of the International Civil Service.
Keynote speaker: James O.C. Jonah
Transcript of speech (pdf format)"From Ralph Bunche to Lakhdar Brahimi: The Future of Peacekeeping and Mediation" , was held on 20 November 2003 in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium. Mr. David Malone, President of International Peace Academy, was the keynote speaker and H.E. Mr. Kishore Mahbubani, Permanent Representative of Singapore , and Dame Margaret Anstee, former Under-Secretary-General, who served as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Angola and Chief, United Nations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM III), were the discussants. Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under Secretary-General, moderated the event, which was introduced by Mr. Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.
"Ralph Bunche and the Integrity of the International Civil Service" , was held on 5 February 2004 in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium from 1 to 3 p.m. James O.C. Jonah, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Senior Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, was the keynote speaker. Catherine Bertini, Under-Secretary-General of the Department of Management, and George Saddler, Chair of the New York Ralph Bunche Centenary Commemoration Committee and President of the Federation of Associations of Former International Civil Servants (FAFICS), were the discussants. Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, introduced the programme, moderated by Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs. Members of Permanent Missions, Secretariat staff, representatives of inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the media were invited to attend and to join in the discussion following the presentations. [Archived Video]
The lecture were held in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium. Brian Urquhart, former United Nations Under Secretary-General, moderated the events, which were introduced by Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information. The programme was open to questions from, and discussion with, the audience. Members of Permanent Missions, Secretariat staff, non-governmental organizations and the media were invited to attend.
Ralph Bunche Centenary Conference at UCLA
Centenary of Ralph Bunche Celebrated by Conference at UCLA
By Leslie Evans
Frank discussions examine the Nobel Prize winning diplomat's contributions to African Studies, his controversial role in the Congo crisis of 1960, and his legacy of trusteeship for emergent and failed states.
Some 60 Africanists, other scholars, and present and former United Nations staff members gathered in the Humanities Conference room at UCLA's Royce Hall June 3 and 4 for a conference to celebrate the centennial of the birth of Nobel Prize winning diplomat Ralph Bunche (1904-1971). The gathering reviewed some of the major events in Ralph Bunche's life and his contributions to ongoing issues such as decolonization in Africa and in African Studies, his clash with Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the 1960 crisis in that country, and Bunche's role in the post-World War II period in developing United Nations policy for international trusteeships over emergent or failed states. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Marcus Garvey Papers Project and the UCLA Globalization Research Center - Africa , under the auspices of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center . The chief organizers of the conference were professors Robert Hill of the Garvey Project and Ed Keller of the Globalization Research Center - Africa .
Grandson of a slave and orphaned at 12, Bunche was born in Detroit and raised in Los Angeles . He distinguished himself early as an outstanding intellect and graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in 1927, although he had had to work his way through college as a janitor and was refused membership in the UCLA debate team because he was black. He taught at Howard University in Washington , DC , while working on his PhD dissertation at Harvard. He received his doctorate from Harvard in 1934 for fieldwork in Togoland and Dahomey in Africa . He later taught at Harvard, served in the U.S. State Department, and in 1946 became head of the United Nations Department of Trusteeship. He had long associations with many American institutions of higher learning. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his work in 1948 as UN mediator between the Arabs and the new State of Israel leading to the peace agreement at the end of the war that produced Israel 's independence. He later served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, most notably in the peacekeeping mission to the Congo in the summer of 1960, where he clashed with Pan-Africanist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
Some fifteen scholars or former associates of Ralph Bunche presented papers at the UCLA conference. These mostly focused on his role in the emergence of Africa from colonial domination between the end of World War II and the 1960s.
The Young Ralph Bunche -- A Dislike of Pan-Africanism
The conference opened with an evening session June 3 that heard an address by Martin Kilson of Harvard University entitled "The Young Ralph J. Bunche and Africa: Betwixt and Between Marxism and Pragmatism." Kilson looked at Bunche's early writings from the period of the 1930s, which elaborated a class-based Marxian theory of European colonialism in Africa . Bunche looked toward a deracialized, market dominated Africa freed of foreign domination. Already in these early writings, notably his 1934 Harvard PhD dissertation, Bunche staked out a view hostile to race-based political movements, particularly Pan-Africanism. Kilson argued that Bunche was a pragmatic rationalist and that he was "too removed from the oppressive specificity of the imperialist process in colonial Africa ."
Why Didn't Decolonization Have Better Results?
The full day of panels and talks on June 4 opened with a discussion of " Africa in the Global Decolonization Process." This session was chaired by Charles Henry of the University of California , Berkeley, author of Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other (New York University Press, 1998). The discussion was opened by Chidiebere Nwaubani, University of Colorado at Boulder . He proposed that gaining political independence in the 1960s amounted largely to replacing European personnel with Africans in the various countries of the continent but "did not subvert the colonial relationship . . . . European interests remained paramount behind the façade of African rule."
Ralph Austen of the University of Chicago suggested that the relatively little resistance to African independence in the 1960s compared to the British war with the Americans in the late eighteenth century or the Chinese in mid-nineteenth century reflected the post-colonial return to free market globalization more typical of the early nineteenth century. This free trade impetus, he said, was strengthened by self-organization in the Third World and competition with the Soviet Union in the cold war, both of which increased pressure to take Third World public opinion into account. On the negative side, he said, it was possible to view the neoliberal substitution of markets for colonies in Africa as "a kind of abandonment."
Francis Nesbitt, an assistant professor at San Diego State University and one of this year's Global Fellows at the UCLA International Institute, took up the clash between Ralph Bunche and South African Premier Jan Smuts at the founding conference of the United Nations over the status of Southwest Africa . Smuts campaigned for annexation of Southwest Africa to the Union of South Africa. He was supported in this by the United States and Britain . Ralph Bunche, as head of the UN's Trusteeship Council, parried Smuts' efforts by inviting "anti-apartheid activists from the continent and the diaspora to address the Trusteeship Council although they were not officially represented." Nesbitt concluded that "collaboration between activists and black government officials and diplomats on the inside was the secret weapon of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States ," both in 1945 and again in the 1980s in the campaign for sanctions against white-ruled South Africa .
The final speaker of this panel was Professor Ntongela Masilela of Pitzer College , who spoke on Ralph Bunche's contacts with African intellectuals during his dissertation research in Togoland and Dahomey in 1932-33. A number, such as R. V. Selope Thema, D. D. T. Jabavu, and Pixley ka Isaka Seme met with Bunche, but, Masilela said, Bunche had difficulty sympathizing with their ethnic-centered ethos in light of his view of modernism as a product of class emancipation.
Decolonizing African Studies
The next panel moved from Africa itself to the study of Africa . The high point of this section was a reminiscence of Ralph Bunche and on the emergence of African Studies in American universities as a serious discipline by the venerable Elliott Percival Skinner . Skinner is Franz Boas Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Columbia University and former U.S. ambassador to Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).
Pearl Robinson , Tufts University , explored a wide range of Ralph Bunche's publications, letters, and other sources to frame Bunche's analysis of Africa and its impact on the field of African Studies. She traced three central themes in Bunche's paradigm: the idea of W. E. B. Du Bois that a talented tenth of the black population would carry the mission of racial uplift; that intellectuals and modern social science would play a central part in restructuring society; and "applications of Bronislaw Malinowski's functionalist paradigm to studies of culture conflict and change."
David Anthony of the University of California , Santa Cruz , commented that, though never a full-time Africanist, Bunche made important contributions to the field. Bunche had studied under some of the leading anthropologists of his day, Melville Herskovits at Northwest and Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. He was an early advocate and practitioner of field work in Africa rather than only the study of documents. While still a graduate student, Anthony said, Bunche "was already clear about the fragility of colonial rule and the inevitability of its eventual demise. . . . [which] distinguishes him among Africanists, many of whom then and later kept their distance from taking stands deemed harmful to their objectivity." Bunche was also more of an activist than many scholars of his day, taking part in the International Committee on African Affairs founded in 1937 by Max Yergan and Paul Robeson, which he later dropped as too much influenced by the Communist Party and went on to his career in international diplomacy.
War and Peacekeeping in Africa
An important part of Ralph Bunche's UN career was involved with peacekeeping missions in Africa . Almost half of the conference was devoted to this theme, under two panels: a general one on "War and Peacekeeping in Africa " and one on the most significant African crisis in which Bunche participated: the 1960 independence of the Congo that devolved into the Katangan secession and the murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
The first of these panels heard Herschelle Challenor of USAID, UCLA Africanist Richard Sklar, and Salih Booker of Africa Action.
Herschelle Challenor commented that there was no formal set of rules in the UN Charter for a peacekeeping mission. "Since 1948," she said, "the United Nations has authorized 57 peacekeeping operations and 18, or 32%, of these have been on the African continent." Ralph Bunche was intimately involved in six of these, in designing the missions and evolving their procedures, over the time he served as Under Secretary-General of the UN, from 1954 to 1971. Initially UN forces were unarmed and prohibited from any resort to force except in self defense.
The Congo , where Bunche was briefly the military commander, "was the first time that a UN peacekeeping operation was mandated by the Security Council to use force for a political end: to stop the secession of Katanga ."
Richard Sklar compared the Congo wars of the 1960s with those of today. Just as today the aim of U.S. and UN policy is to stop the Congo 's neighbors from intervening in that country, so "in 1961 Hammarskjold and Bunche sought to prevent Southern Rhodesian whites from extending into the Congo ."
Today, Sklar said, "Colin Powell seeks to restore authority in the Congo . He seeks to prevent spheres of predominant interest by neighborhood insiders." He lamented the interventions in the Congo of Zimbabwe, Angola , Rwanda , and Uganda . "The result has been a persistent 'hidden' war accounting for an estimated 3.5 million deaths since 1998." He pointed to the similar devastation states by their neighbors in Northeastern and Western Africa . While Western imperialism was the traditional enemy of African nationalists, Sklar argued that the current U.S. open door policy is a desirable counterweight for weak African states that face hostile dictatorial regimes nearby. "The open door is based on the maxim of openness, of commerce, of investment, and on the idea of modernizations of society. It was suspended by the United States for Africa during the period of the cold war in deference to [European] allies, but after the cold war the United States has reasserted the policy of the open door. Ron Brown, late secretary of commerce, was instrumental in this."
For African states faced with the threat of violence from neighboring powers, Sklar said, "It is their prerogative to seek external guardians. Appeal to the United States would be very much in the tradition of honoring the legacy and tradition of Ralph Bunche."
In the Congo today, he said, "the greatest danger comes along fault lines, especially the one that runs from Kinshasa [capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo ] to Kigali [the capital of Rwanda ], where you have internal groups that align themselves with Rwanda or Kinshasa . The most dangerous of all is the Union of Patriotic Congolese led by Thomas Lubanga, a very dangerous man in opposition to the militias aligned with Kinshasa . The most dangerous militia is also aligned with Rwanda . Turbulence is leading to increasing conflict."
The significance of the current UN operation in the Congo , Sklar said, "is an attempt to control these elements of turbulence. The person in the Ralph Bunche tradition there now is William Lacy Swing, a wise choice as a deputy in the Congo ."
Salih Booker , executive director of Africa Action, recalled that "Ralph Bunche wasn't allowed to be on the UCLA debate club when he was here because they wouldn't let Negroes on." Bunche Hall at UCLA, where the Center for African Studies is located, was completed in 1964, but named for Ralph Bunche in 1969. Bunche spoke at the dedication. "Students at UCLA insisted to name the hall after Ralph Bunche," Salih Booker said, "not the UCLA administration."
Turning to Africa , he continued, "Most African nations are not at war, but the dozen or so conflicts that do exist disastrously impact on the continent. There is a peace process of each of the major conflicts. What is lacking usually is sufficient support from the UN or from the governments of rich countries that have constrained the UN peacekeeping role.
"In 1948 Ralph Bunche created the first peace truce observer mission. They would be unarmed. This has remained a successful approach in many cases. In 1956 he was the lead figure in creating the Suez emergency force, where they had to improvise quickly. They rejected troops bringing national flags; there is no representation of your nationality. The UN adopted the blue beret at that time."
Booker attributed the failure of peacekeeping in Africa "largely to the lack of international will." He accused the developed countries of holding a double standard. He compared the response in Sierra Leone and the Congo to that in Kosovo. "In Kosovo some 30,000 troops were dispatched, initially after only a few dozen killings in ethnic cleansing by the Serbs. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo where more than 3 million have died there are a little over 10,000 UN troops." He also said that $1.19 was spent on each Kosovo refugee while only $.19 was spent on each African refugee.
Booker criticized the rich countries of the world for leaving peacekeeping in Africa to the immediate neighbors of the troubled states. "It should not be the expectation that Liberia 's immediate neighbors have the capacity to bring peace and security to Liberia . 'Let the Africans sort this out themselves.' You are expecting the most impoverished peoples in the world to resolve these kinds of conflicts."
He added that the U.S. armed forces "are disproportionately comprised of peoples of African descent but the one continent where they won't send troops for peacekeeping is Africa . The U.S. refused to use the word genocide in Rwanda to avoid their legal obligation to intervene." Booker distinguished his view from that of people who see all American military intervention abroad as imperialist and negative. "We have to challenge the idea that the U.S. can't do any good with its military forces anywhere. We have to demand that U.S. military forces be used in Africa for peacekeeping operations."
Ralph Bunche and Patrice Lumumba
A Critical View of
Bunche's Role in the Congo
One of the major crises in Ralph Bunche's life, and one where his role was less creditable than in other episodes, was his part in the UN intervention in the Congo in 1960-61, leading to the assassination of Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba. A full panel at the conference was devoted to this controversial issue and it was confronted very directly.
Three distinguished panelists reviewed Bunche's conduct in the Congo , each with a different viewpoint. The most critical was Congolese political scientist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja , director of the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre. Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor emeritus of African studies at Howard University in Washington , DC , and a former president of the African Studies Association of the United States . The other panelists were Crawford Young , emeritus political science professor at the University of Wisconsin , Madison ; also a former president of the African Studies Association. And John Olver , who had served with the United Nations since 1945, including as Chief Administrative Officer of the UN Emergency Force in the Gaza Strip in 1957, and in a similar post in the Congo in 1960 under Ralph Bunche. He later held responsible positions in the UN until his retirement in 1980, including as Assistant Secretary-General.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja turned directly to the early and sharp animosity of Ralph Bunche toward Patrice Lumumba. "How could a person as progressive and radical as he is depicted within the UN been so mistaken about Lumumba and about Congo independence?" he asked.
"Bunche was sent to the Congo in June 1960 to represent Hammarskjold at the independence ceremonies. He stayed on for over two months and became commander of the UN operations in the Congo . He took part in the decisions whose ultimate result was the fall of Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister." Nzongola-Ntalaja said that Bunche "Shared the common cold war outlook, seeing Lumumba as too influenced by Pan-Africanism to be friendly to Western interests."
He traced the events between June and August 1960, beginning with Lumumba's independence day speech. "Bunche arrived with negative attitudes toward Lumumba, negative toward all radical nationalists including Nasser and Nkrumah. The Belgians briefed Bunche negatively about Lumumba. He had won a plurality in elections but was not the first choice of Belgians, who backed Kasavubu, whose party had only 12 seats compared to more than 30 for Lumumba's party. Once Lumumba became prime minister he agreed to help Kasavubu as titular head of state. The first sign of division came on June 30, 1960 , with Lumumba's independence day speech against Belgian colonialism, now a classic speech."
The Belgian king had recently declared that Congolese independence was the culmination of the civilizing mission begun by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1895. "Lumumba summarized the crimes of the Belgians toward the Congo . He was accused afterward of being insulting. Those who criticized Lumumba's speech did not comment on the insult of the Belgian king's speech justifying a ruler responsible for more than ten million deaths in their country."
A crisis erupted immediately after the declaration of Congolese independence when the governor of Katanga province, Moises Tshombe, in turn declared independence from the Congo and seceded, with the backing of white mercenaries, foreign mining interests, and Belgian troops. The UN announced it was prepared to use force to return Katanga to the Congo , but temporized with Tshombe and stood aside as Congolese President Kasavubu and Premier Lumumba fell out and mutually dismissed each other from office at the beginning of September.
At the beginning of the Katanga secession "Lumumba appealed to the United States for military intervention" against Tshombe and his Belgian supporters. "Then he switched to appeal to the United Nations. The Security Council authorized a mission with Bunche as interim force commander. The purpose of the UN intervention was to remove Belgian troops and end the Katanga secession." Dag Hammarskjold adopted a stance of asking the Belgians to leave peacefully. They did so in the main part of the Congo , "but this was certainly not true in Katanga ." Instead of confronting the Belgians in Katanga , however, "the UN tried to take over the rest of the Congo while not intervening in Katanga . The UN was acting as though it was the governing authority in the Congo ."
Bunche, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja contended, was successfully bluffed by Tshombe, who threatened strong civilian resistance to the entry of UN troops into Katanga . "There were only Belgian troops and white mercenaries in rebellion."
Faced with the failure of the UN to act, "Lumumba decided to rely on his own army to end the secession. He then asked the Soviet Union for trucks and other materiel. Washington looked on him as an African Fidel Castro. Bunche's reports left UN officials questioning Lumumba's mental stability, while Washington thought he was a communist."
Bunche was replaced at the end of August 1960. "The UN temporary commander between Bunche and his successor helped to remove Lumumba from power. So witting or unwitting they provided the justification for removing a democratically elected leader by illegal means."
On September 5, 1960 , Congolese President Joseph Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba. Lumumba in turn declared Kasavubu's action illegal. Parliament backed Lumumba. On September 19, Congolese Army Chief of Staff Colonel Joseph Mobutu declared that the army had decided to neutralize both governments and establish a College of Commissioners to administer the country on an interim basis. Lumumba became a de facto prisoner in the prime minister's residence, guarded by U.N. forces who were in turn surrounded by Congolese Army troops. He escaped on November 27 and tried to make his way overland to his home province. He was soon captured and imprisoned by Mobutu's forces. He was flown to Elizabethville in Katanga in January 1961. He was beaten to death either on the plane or shortly after his arrival.
A Low Point in Bunche's Career
Crawford Young regarded Bunche's distaste for Lumumba as a failing, but equally saw Lumumba as naïve in the ways of the larger world and regarded both men as victims of the chaotic situation.
"Bunche set forth for the Congo in late June 1960 expecting to take part in the independence celebrations and help Congo apply for UN membership. He was a person ideally suited to play the role he was called on to play, through his African-focused dissertation work, his African study in 1932-33 and 1936-38, his Kenya stay, his Africa work with the OSS in World War II. He had shown diplomatic skill in working in the Palestine-Israel crisis that won him the Nobel Prize. He had strong personal ties to Dag Hammarskjold."
Young also pointed to what proved to be a failing in Bunche's world view: "He had a visceral distaste for people he viewed as demagogues. He so regarded Lumumba." Young called this "a tragic incompatibility."
After Lumumba's assassination, Young recounted, Bunche in a 1964 speech "characterized Lumumba as a spellbinding speaker, tireless, shrewd, perceptive, suspicious of people around him. Perhaps a leftist but nobody's stooge." However, while he was in the Congo and trying to work with Lumumba in 1960, Bunche wrote to his wife: "that madman Lumumba is recklessly on the attack against Dag and the UN" and referred to "the insane fulminations of one reckless man."
Turning to Lumumba, Crawford Young described him as "a young leader of towering ambition. A major handicap, in my reading, was coming to power with a limited experience in statecraft or feeling for the global forces that would be mobilized by the Congo crisis."
Young briefly summarized the issues in the crisis: "The Belgian formula consisted of creating a Congolese superstructure while the whole command structure of the civil service and the army was to remain entirely Belgian. That was an impossible structure. Other decolonizations took place over time. This was to take place overnight, giving rise to extravagant hope and an undercurrent of fear. The trigger event was the mutiny of the whole army five days after independence. The fear factor exploded. It gave rise to a mood of panic. This was followed by the Katanga secession and of diamond producing area. The Western powers were obsessed with the notion of communist penetration. On the Congolese side this validated the idea of an imperialist plot to undo African independence."
Lumumba's majority was narrow, he said, with little real discipline over nominal members of his party. He soon "became isolated with a small entourage." When Kasavubu and Lumumba fell out, " America intervened to overthrow Lumumba."
Young called the Congo intervention "a low point in Bunche's distinguished career of service." He concluded: "The outcome was certainly a tragic one. His inability to overcome his hostile relationship with Lumumba was the first chapter in a long period of tragedy in the Congo ."
An Old Associate Remembers
John Olver was one of the few people at the conference who knew Ralph Bunche personally, and certainly the one who knew him best. "I joined the UN in 1946," he said, "when the temporary headquarters was set up in New York , first in Hunter College and later in a military facility. Ralph Bunche's office was just down the hall from my office. One day he asked me whether I thought he might be able to join in with a small football pool we had organized. There were about a dozen of us young American involved. Later it turned out that for a couple of weeks running Ralph won the pool and there was a lot of grumbling, saying it wasn't fair because he knew all the West Coast teams."
Olver worked with Ralph Bunche in the Middle East during the Suez crisis in 1956-57. "This was the creation of the first peacekeeping machine that the UN had been able to produce," he recalled. "I had been asked to work on the financial plans for this first emergency force. . . . I had to get out there and be the chief manager for the force. The Secretary-General always insisted on having his final civilian authority over the forces that were brought into the scene. Think what it takes working from New York by telephone and telegraph to put together an integrated viable military force -- without even a common uniform."
One time in Gaza , he said, "we needed desperately to get in touch with authorities in Jerusalem , but we were prohibited from going into Israel . Ben Gurion had insisted that we were not to cross the line into Israel . I called Ralph and told him we had contacted the authorities. He asked how that could be. I said we had one little line we had rolled across the armistice line and they didn't know about it. He was furious and said this was the kind of thing that could destroy us."
Olver also served under Ralph Bunche in the Congo . "We didn't have email, photocopies, and faxes. The Secretary-General kept coming out, which threw us into disarray. We didn't have the facilities to take care of him. The local telephone service didn't work well." Olver went to look at the phone boxes in the basement. "I found hundreds of wires hooked into their system by foreign espionage agencies that weakened its signals." Dag Hammarskjold said to leave the taps alone as it was the price of being the center of attention. Olver described the UN Congo mission as having "a chaotic existence and a hand to mouth administration."
JohnOlver gave his own view of the Congo politics at that time: "I could see Lumumba was a very difficult person to deal with because he tended to shift emphasis. I myself came to believe that a greater problem for Ralph in terms of personalities, even greater than Lumumba, was Tshombe in Katanga trying to break away with the Belgians. I remember the first time Ralph went down to see if he could reason with Tshombe in Elizabethville. I worried about him. He came back in the late afternoon looking as defeated as I ever saw Ralph Bunche. Did you make any progress? He replied, 'Johnny, if Hollywood tried to make a picture out of this they would be laughed out of every theater in the country. They can take Katanga and they can shove it.'"
Olver also had a very negative assessment of the first UN military commander in the Congo crisis, General Von Horn. "He had been commander of the forces in Jerusalem . He was one of those military who did not understand how the civilian command was supposed to work so he was a problem for me and Ralph all along the way."
Trusteeship Then and Now: Aid to Troubled States or a New Colonialism?
The final session of the conference was an evening keynote speech by Neta Crawford of Brown University . Ralph Bunche was chosen by UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie in 1946 to head the UN's Trusteeship Department. In this capacity he developed much of the UN protocols for taking over and managing states emerging from colonialism or collapsing into anarchy. This was and remains today an extremely touchy issue, as protectorates were a standard device of imperial empires for establishing colonial rule, and trusteeship by definition meant the loss of sovereignty to a foreign military and civil administration.
The United Nations trusteeship system, begun in 1946, Neta Crawford said, "had its roots in the British colonial regime in India , the civilizing mission, then the League of Nations mandate system of 1918-1945. It was an outgrowth of colonial mission: civilizing native races, bringing them Christianity, etc." She pointed to an extensive current discussion in U.S. policy journals going back to the early 1990s of reviving schemes of long-term foreign control over "failed states" as a contemporary revival of the trusteeship idea.
"Now we see a return to the later ideas of the League of Nations mandates," she said, citing among others an article by Paul Johnson in the April 18, 1993 , New York Times entitled "Colonialism Back and Not a Moment Too Soon." Crawford noted that "Paul Johnson suggested mandates of 50 or 100 years."
She asked: "What kinds of institutions were trusteeships? Was it a progressive development? Or was it regressive and paternalistic? Is it an appropriate model for failed states today?"
At the end of World War I the League of Nations established mandates over territories taken in war. Among these were an important part of the Middle East : Iraq , Palestine , Transjordan , Syria , and Lebanon . "The population of mandatory states was not involved in writing mandate agreements," Crawford said. There were annual written reports by the mandatory power to the League of Nations . Representatives of these mainly European governments could be questioned by the League of Nations Permanent Mandate Commission, but no physical inspections were included in the rules.
"Were mandates better than colonies? Bunche studied this in his dissertation. There was a single French administration in Togoland and Dahomey , which were contiguous territories. Dahomey was a French colony, Togoland was a mandate administered by France . Togoland was better in some respects. Forced labor was lighter for residents of Togoland than Dahomey , tax was lighter, there was greater representation of natives in government."
At the same time, there were "no injunctions to restrain unjust practices, no method for the League to verify statements made by the mandatory powers in their annual reports."
Although flawed, "Bunche saw them as progressive institutions. He wrote that 'Public opinion will compel as it has to an extent already, the extension of identical principles to retarded peoples throughout the world, whether they dwell in areas held as colonies and possessions or not.' Today we would find these ideas paternalistic."
After World War II, the United Nations trusteeship system replaced mandates. "Bunche took part in drafting the chapters on this. He expanded the role of oversight and accountability. Here he used his insights gained in studying the mandate system. He developed more detailed questionnaires to assess trusteeship administration. The trusteeship council was empowered to make periodic visits to the territory, which had not been true of the mandate system." The rules of trusteeship provided for the right to petition directly to the UN, "an innovation that comes directly from Bunche's dissertation. The trusteeship system had an enormous impact on the decolonization project."
The main improvements were greater international oversight and accountability. "It was also assumed the trusteeships would be of limited duration, with the aim of self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. It assisted states on the road to self-government."
In the 1980s and 1990s UN oversight of country governments has been renamed the transitional administration. "We have seen gradually larger peacekeeping missions in the 1980s and 1990s, mission creep, where peacekeeping becomes peacemaking and nation-building. This is trusteeship in all but name." Neta Crawford gave the examples of Cambodia in 1992, Bosnia , Eastern Slavonia , Kosovo, East Timor , and Liberia .
"To these have been added ad hoc postwar occupations not run by the United Nations, primarily in Afghanistan , Iraq , and Sierra Leone ." She raised a concern that control by individual governments rather than the United Nations has provided "less accountability than in the trusteeships."
She concluded by characterizing the new trusteeships and occupations "a paradoxical institution." Even in Ralph Bunche's day, she said, such foreign control "was both paternalistic and cover for exploitation and a progressive institution for nation building" which sometimes led to paternalism and relations of dependency.
Ralph Bunche had seen this problem and in 1947 pointed to "the essential anomaly in the profession of democratic principles as the basis for world order and the ruling of one people by another." Crawford concluded that such imposed regimes are "not so bad as their detractors assert nor so benign as their supporters allege. They at least gives the people of the territory someone to appeal to besides the occupier. We must keep the elements of oversight and accountability that Bunche made more robust and prominent in contemporary trusteeships."
For more information, please visit: http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=11977
Ralph J. Bunche Anniversary Lecture, Howard University
Address by Prime Minister Most Hon. P. J. Patterson, at Ralph Bunche Anniversary Lecture, Howard University, Washington, October 25, 2003
“THE RELEVANCE OF THE UNITED NATIONS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY”
Introductory Remarks
It is a distinct pleasure and great honour to be here this afternoon to participate in the celebrations to mark the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Ralph J. Bunche, a tireless fighter in the struggle for peace and human dignity.
I readily accepted this invitation to offer some reflections on the United Nations and its relevance to the twenty-first century as we honour the memory of an Afro-American Statesman, who was a pioneer, an ardent defender of the UN and a staunch advocate for global development.
It is indeed appropriate that this event takes place on the campus of this prestigious institution, with its enduring commitment to educating students, African Americans and other people of colour in particular, for leadership and service to this nation, the United States of America, and the global community.
There can be no greater role model for the students of this institution than this Nobel Laureate, scholar and humanitarian.
Howard University has long been the cradle of academic excellence and has an impressive roster of alumni, not only of African-Americans but large numbers of students of African heritage, from Africa, the Caribbean and other far flung regions of the world, who have given and continue to give, distinguished service in their communities and in the international arena.
My own personal admiration for Ralph Bunche dates back to my student days.
Having made my choice clear then, and now having the privilege of making a contribution to the political life of my country and the Caribbean region, I wish today, to make a small gesture of support for the Ralph Bunche Centre by presenting two copies of a recently published collection of my speeches entitled “A Jamaican Voice in Caribbean and World Politics”.
It reflects my own perspectives on the international arena from many years of exposure at the highest levels of international negotiation and discourse since I first served in my country's foreign ministry in the seventies and into this new millennium. I trust it will give to the students at the Centre a special insight into the formidable challenges faced by small economies, and the solutions which we seek to end our state of persistent underdevelopment and poverty in a less than caring international environment.
By a fitting coincidence, today marks the end of Jamaica's celebration of National Heritage week as we gather here to commemorate the memory of Ralph Bunche, a selfless international servant, but one who had to confront racial barriers and ethnic discrimination in his own country.
Among our National Heroes, the first and perhaps the most prominent is the renowned Marcus Garvey. This great Jamaican, this tireless fighter for dignity of peoples the world over, inspired thousands in the United States and indeed millions around the world, through his profound sense of internationalism and his deep commitment to social justice and human rights.
At a ceremony last Monday marking the restoration of Liberty Hall, Marcus Garvey's headquarters in the heart of the Jamaican capital, we were reminded of the vision of this philosopher and humanitarian during the early decades of the last century.
His contribution in retrospect, is made even more remarkable, given the fact that at the relatively young age of thirty-four, Marcus Garvey already had thousands of followers throughout the hemisphere, who were members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
Garvey and the influence of the UNIA contributed to the later emergence of the civil rights movement in the United States and greatly benefited the work of American stalwarts such as the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Marcus Garvey's sojourn in America, though relatively brief in its tenure, served to define the great historical interconnectedness between African-Americans, the people of Jamaica, and indeed, peoples of African descent throughout the Americas.
Still regarded by millions of African-Americans as among the ten most influential persons of the 20th century, Garvey's influence and the power of his ideals continue to resonate here in the U.S., in the Caribbean and in the world at large.
For this reason, the Jamaican Government and our people remain indebted to the Congressional Black Caucus for its unswerving advocacy, in the United States Congress, to secure the complete exoneration of Marcus Garvey.
The Government and people of Jamaica strongly endorse and my Administration will render whatever diplomatic support and representation may be necessary to finally vindicate Marcus Garvey.
We are heartened that increasing numbers of lawmakers continue to express support of this Bill and we laud the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressman Rangel for their longstanding commitment to Garvey's legacy.
The CBC's advocacy on this issue is symbolic of the deep-seated internationalist spirit and co-operation that characterize the enduring bonds between African-Americans and others in the Diaspora, in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.
It was this embrace, both by Marcus Garvey and indeed Ralph Bunche, of a global agenda which sought to promote justice to foster peace to preserve human dignity, that underscores their common passionate pursuit of their lofty ideals.
The Founding of the United Nations
Yesterday, 24th October, was celebrated as United Nations Day, marking the 58th anniversary of the organization. Ralph Bunche was one of the major players in the formation of the UN and was the principal author of two chapters of the Charter – on trusteeship and self-governing territories.
It was also he who devised the machinery to expedite the massive move toward decolonisation that swept across the world after the end of World War II at the founding of the UN.
Through his work in the UN, he was to become the foremost international mediator and peacekeeper of his time, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, a prize which in his modesty he had to be persuaded to accept as he felt it unnecessary to be awarded such an honour simply for doing his job!
Bunche believed passionately in the purposes, as set forth in the Charter to:
- Maintain international peace and security;
- Develop friendly relations among nations;
- Cooperate in solving international economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems and in promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; and
- Be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in attaining these ends.
Ralph Bunche who was generally and fondly known as “Mr. UN”, very much reflects the tides and ebbs of that Organisation, which is as much venerated as it is maligned.
But what lingers most with us today - is that his vision for international peace, under the auspices of the UN, and his passionate belief in preventive diplomacy and the pacific settlement of conflicts remain worthy ideals based on sound principles, which are no less important and relevant today than they were at the time when the UN was founded.
An Equal State
The UN was created in a very deliberate manner, as a response to the devastating impact of two World Wars on global relations. The principles and purposes of the charter of the Organisation were carefully crafted to provide the foundation of a body which would save succeeding generations from the scourge of war;
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights;
to promote justice and respect for the rule of law; to fuel social and economic progress.
All states, big or small, rich or poor were offered an equal stake and a voice in the United Nations.
It is important to recall that the fear of return to world war was a very real one which motivated the commitment to international peace and security. In these circumstances, special emphasis was placed on the United Nations machinery for the settlement of disputes and promotion of cooperation between states to minimise conflict and remove danger. The environment in which we currently operate render these goals and objectives as relevant and crucial as they were fifty-eight years ago.
While we no longer fear a nuclear holocaust, the armed conflicts which often involve children and result in cruel mutilation, the violent disintegration of established nation states, the eruption of ethnic cleansing, genocide, the dangers of nuclear proliferation, have all combined to create unprecedented levels of fear and global insecurity.
Indeed, we are reminded of a quote from President Eisenhower, speaking at a time of mad militarism over 50 years ago:
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a wooden cross.”
While, its effectiveness was severely eroded by bitter superpower rivalry, let us not forget that during this difficult period of political polarisation the United Nations was still able to realise some of its most notable achievements.
Its role on trusteeship matters and decolonisation was most significant.
Ralph Bunche will always be remembered for his sterling contributions and pioneering work in these fields. He was instrumental in drafting the sections of the UN Charter dealing with trusteeship and the future of non-self governing territories. He subsequently became head of the Trusteeship Division.
His pioneering work was critical to the self-determination struggles and political independence of close to one billion people throughout the continents of Asia, Africa and later in the Caribbean. Bunche perceived the self-determination of colonial peoples as essential for the maintenance of international order and world peace. Newly independent states, including Jamaica in the 1960's, benefited from the economic and technical assistance programmes which Bunche had initiated.
The United Nations played a pivotal role in the struggle against Apartheid, leading to its demise in South Africa in 1993 and the formation of a truly democratic and non-racial state.
New Areas of Cooperation
The UN was able during this period to extend its presence and reach into new areas of cooperation, which emphasized the benefits of broadening international action; the development of new programmes for economic and social development and as a corollary; the establishment of new institutions.
A number of international conferences and meetings on issues such as the environment, on the question of Palestine, on the Law of the Sea were able to contribute in carving safe routes of passage through hazardous political minefields and thereby to engender a deeper understanding and closer appreciation of the importance of the multilateral approach to other issues of grave global impact.
These agreements became embodied in new institutions such as UNESCO, UNEP, UNIDO, UNCTAD, the IAEA, UNDP, UNICEF and the UNHCR, among others.
The body of international law has been significantly expanded through the adoption of legal agreements in various fields to promote economic development and to enhance international peace and security.
MULTILATERALISM
This is clear evidence that the UN, and by extension multilateralism, works best where and when it is allowed to do so. While the Cold War era may have stymied the potential of the UN in several respects, the period since then has offered challenges of a magnitude hitherto unknown. Indeed, they are of such complexity as to require cooperative action by the entire international community.
Faced as we are with recurring outbreaks of war, the threats of terrorism, and the manifest abuse of human rights, we have no acceptable option but to create a climate of trust and respect for international law by restoring confidence in an international system of which the UN must be the cornerstone.
The alternatives are too ghastly to contemplate: a reversion to the rules of the jungle or, a surrender to the dictates of a global hegemony.
We must, without further delay, set in motion an emergency process for the reform of the UN which will restore its primacy in the community of nations thereby returning us to the superior values of democracy in the global state and permit the ascendancy of the rule of law everywhere.
It has to be accepted that despite our differences in wealth, religion, gender, military power or political creed, the planet earth provides the only common space for all mankind.
If as we proclaim, we all belong to a single global village, we need to strengthen the role and function of the only body with the potential to formulate the rules to which we should all subscribe. Instead of usurping its authority, we need to fortify the role and function of the UN.
There are clear and urgent imperatives for pursuing the path of multilateral cooperation and for strengthening the United Nations system. Our constituents demand that of us and the challenges of the new era oblige us to do so.
We need to manage the global society to promote international law which protects the weak from the strong and regulates the use of military force.
The war in Iraq brought to the fore the need for the international community to work together to prevent and resolve conflict and to bring political stability to countries and regions in turmoil.
There is a compelling need to strengthen the regime of international law to ensure common rules. The rule of law is not a luxury to which we resort just when it is expedient.
All members of the United Nations should abide by the Charter and observe the principles of international law which are the instruments that provide the organization with its legitimacy and strength.
The search must continue for the settlement of disputes especially in long-standing situations such as the Middle East. The Organization cannot shirk its duty to confront this task because of its magnitude.
The armistice that ended the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 was envisaged as a prelude to a permanent Accord which has proven elusive for 55 years. We need another Ralph Bunche today.
Reform
In the context of the new era, I suggest that the reform of the United Nations to confront the new realities, the new challenges, the new expectations, is undoubtedly its most urgent task.
Forms of decision-making which stifle the achievement of agreement on critical areas of international life are anachronistic. It is a contradiction to expect more of the organization but not to provide it with the means for achievement.
None of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council can question the compelling arguments to alter its design and function, if it is to fulfill the mandate conferred by the Charter in the realities of this twenty-first century.
The case for expansion of membership is irrefutable. It must be reformed in a way so as to command the support of all Member States in its decisions for the maintenance of international peace and security. The reform must extend beyond composition and geographical balance. It must be broadly representative of the international community as a whole. It must correspond with the principle of the sovereign equality of all Member States.
This is the only way it can regain the full confidence of Member States and exercise its commanding duties, in the world community.
Long and sterile debates, extended agenda to satisfy tradition should no longer be fashionable.
Failure to address serious issues or inability to agree on how to do so, should not be the result of fear of the veto or the dominance of might.
The Security Council as guardian of the peace must lead by example.
Cooperative Action
There is also the need to develop a framework which promotes understanding between different cultures and avoids conflict. International institutions like the UN must support this effort and promote the observance of human rights and the rule of law worldwide.
The international community, through the UN, must counter the dangerous spread of terrorism and its various manifestations. We must respect the concerns of those who feel uniquely threatened and replace the tendency to unilateral actions, with collective and multilateral approaches in order to address the roots of those concerns.
Sustained and cooperative international action is also required to control the increase and spread of weapons of mass destruction. We must be careful to ensure, however, that in the fight against terrorism and the spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction, we do not ignore other important issues such as poverty and HIV/AIDS, which constitute obstacles to development of gargantuan proportions.
The international community must not relent in the ongoing efforts to combat transnational crime on drug trafficking.
Like any battle, victory will only be won by resolute and collective action on land, sea and air.
The critical problems facing us concerning war and peace are compounded by the proliferation of weapons of all kinds. Military expenditure globally now amounts to over US$800 billion annually. Experience has shown, however, that military power and massive investment in weapons do not bring security and lasting peace.
The force of arms cannot impose lasting peace. Instead, it breeds a climate of insecurity and feeds violence, war and terrorism. In the words of Ralph Bunche:
“To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honourable course in the effort to save peace. The War (referring to World War II) has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions which begets further war.”
The arms industry fuels a rapidly growing underworld of transnational organized crime, which jeopardizes law and order and impedes economic growth and social progress. We cannot continue to divert the financial resources so vitally needed for development and related programmes for fighting poverty and disease into funding wars.
We cannot afford to divert the attention of the world community away from the attainment of development objectives to an unending cycle of armed conflict.
The war on terror must be fought and fought vigorously on all fronts. Jamaica and all Caribbean Countries were in the frontline of condemnation of the acts of international terrorism that marked 9/11. We lost many of our own Caribbean citizens in the dastardly attacks.
We, in Jamaica, have now completed the draft of a comprehensive Anti-Terrorism Act which will be tabled in the Houses of Parliament on my return home for early debate and passage.
Yesterday the Secretary-General unveiled a memorial to those who lost their lives in the service of the United Nations. Today, we salute the memory of all victims of the recent terrorist bombings in Baghdad.
But as the Secretary-General has stated in his Annual Report, “there is danger that we may retreat from some of the important gains of the 1990s, as human rights come under pressure from both terrorism and from the methods used by countries to fight it”.
We must be on the alert so as to avoid any such risk.
The Post Cold War era and the new century upon which we have embarked are undoubtedly fraught with myriad challenges, of greater complexity than in 1945 when the Charter itself was crafted.
We face global challenges both old and new, ushered in by the scientific revolution, technological advances, population explosion, the spread of new diseases such as HIV/AIDS, persistent internal conflicts within societies, and environmental degradation.
No one can dispute the responsibility and obligation of the international community to act firmly against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It must also do so for the illicit traffic in small arms and weapons, which wreak such havoc in countries like Jamaica.
It must be resolute in the fight against all forms of terrorism. We must resist the building of nuclear arsenals.
Human Development
But the international community also has the political and moral obligation to face firmly the issues of poverty, social exclusion and unemployment.
In the words of Ralph Bunche:
“If peace is to be secure, long-lasting and long-starved people of the world, the underprivileged and the undernourished, must begin to realise without delay, the promise of a new day and a new life.”
Ralph Bunche did not say these words then, nor do I today repeat them, to dilute the primacy of the need for international peace. To the contrary, as we examine the relevance of the United Nations in the twenty-first century, we must not make the mistake of ignoring the need for peacekeeping efforts, whether on the continents of Europe or Africa.
But the attainment of peace and security cannot be divorced from meaningful goals for human development. The resources required for development and related programmes can only be made available if they are not diverted to funding wars. Wars and armed conflict consume human and financial resources needed for development, for fighting poverty and disease. Efforts to end conflicts distract the world community's attention from the pursuit of attainable development goals.
We need to promote equity in the international economic system so that there is balance in the spread of economic opportunities and in the distribution of global prosperity. The UN more than ever needs a strong development focus. We must seek to operationalize the Millennium Development Goals.
Developing countries, particularly in Africa, face enormous economic challenges and require the continued support of the international community in a spirit of partnership.
Progress is still achievable in the post-Cancun period, provided we all prepare to infuse the negotiations with a fresh momentum.
It cannot escape mention that the international community has benefited significantly from efforts made over the years to strengthen its engagement with civil society in all spheres of activity. This process must continue.
Non-governmental organizations have gained access in areas of conflict when the UN has been unable to do so. They often meet people at their most basic areas of need. So too have they been an important part of the partnership in the implementations of action programmes of the UN derived from a series of global conference especially in the decade of the 90s.
CARICOM Concerns
Small countries like Jamaica and those of the Caribbean region, of similar size and status look to the United Nations in a special way.
In order to strengthen our economies, we need a more favorable trading environment for our products, more rapid and effective debt relief. The dogma of globalization and liberalization must be tailored to enable small economies to escape the trapdoor of poverty.
We require a special prescription for the problems of Small Island States, the issues of our vulnerability and their effects on development prospects.
CARICOM States have a vested interest in a United Nations system which can regain its strength and vitality and with the capacity to play an expanded role in the multilateral process in the collective search for common solutions to the problems and challenges of the new world environment.
We intend to actively participate in the UN Reform Debate and to engage other Member States in building support for the UN Secretary-General wide-ranging initiatives designed to improve the overall effectiveness of the organization through reform of the institution's infrastructure.
RELEVANCE
If the UN is to retain its relevance in the twenty-first century, it must ensure that the partnership envisaged between the Developed and Developing World in our Millennium Development Goals, is not used as a vehicle for the imposition of conditionalities to promote bilateral political objectives. True partnership must respect the concept of ownership by recipients and the national priorities that they determine.
Development policies and development cooperation must be monitored closely within the international system. Decisions affecting development are being taken in different arenas, different forums and among different agencies. Increasingly, there is need to ensure coherence in policies and programmes.
We need to develop an effective mechanism for conducting such an exercise. One of the urgent tasks of the moment is to create a mechanism within the international architecture, which will focus on trade, finance, technology and development policy in an integrated manner.
The democracy which we seek to practice should not be confined within our domestic borders, but should embrace all the Multilateral Institutions as well. The Bretton Woods Institutions, and the WTO, cannot be exempt from the requirements of transparency and democratic decision-making.
We can eliminate hunger, reduce poverty, empower women, nurture all the children of the world, banish ignorance and combat disease, during the first decade of this new millennium with the goodwill and determination of those who are presently charged with the tasks of leadership, in the political field, those at the helm of our Multilateral Organizations and Corporate Businesses.
Conclusion
I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that the United Nations is the only vehicle with the moral authority and the global prestige to ensure the continued development of the world and its peoples in all our diversity. With the political will of all world leaders, with necessary reform within its systems and new financial commitments and renewed sensitivity on the part of the wealthiest nations, there is hope.
Yes, the war in Iraq has severely tested the principle of collective security and the resilience of the organization. Conflict and war, confrontation and intransigence on the part of leaders in many countries continue to exercise our patience, our goodwill and our confidence in the future of a world of peace and prosperity. But let us continue to work to achieve the vision of the Founders of this organization.
The sterling value of the rich legacy which Ralph Bunche has bequeathed to the generation of today forbids the pronouncement of a requiem to the United Nations.
After all is said and done, it still remains the only vehicle with the capacity and potential to provide global governance and to promote universal peace and security.
Let us who are gathered on this memorable occasion hear his strong and persuasive voice, urging us to empower the United Nations, in contemporary times, so that it can be the symbol of our common humanity and an instrument of peace and progress for all mankind.
The words of the man whose life and work we celebrate today still ring true. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize he stated:
“I have a deep-seated bias against hate and intolerance. I have a bias against racial and religious bigotry. I have a bias against war; a bias for peace. I have a bias that leads me to believe in the essential goodness of my fellowman; which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble.”
Let us in honor of his memory and all those who have worked to fulfill the mission of this organization, go forward together, determined to fulfill the aims and objectives of the United Nations, eager and equipped to fulfill the hopes of the human race for peace, security, development, equality and justice in the first decade of the new millennium by becoming all so resolved.
Delmos Jones Visiting Scholar Program
The Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies & the Political Science Department, CUNY Graduate Center co-sponsored two lectures in the Delmos Jones Visiting Scholar Program. Professor Charles Henry delivered the lecture “Ralph Bunche and the Evolution of Human Rights” on December 11, 2003. Professor Paula McClain, delivered the lecture “Ralph Bunche’s 1936 “A World View of Race: Its Contemporary Salience” on February 5, 2004.
Crisis in Darfur: International Law and the Prevention of Genocide
Speakers:
Jerry Fowler
Staff Director of the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Gayle Smith
Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
Former Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council
This program examines the current humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan from the perspective of both international law and international diplomacy. Do events in Darfur meet the legal definition of "genocide"? Does international law impose an obligation on Sudan or other countries to take action? From a policy perspective, what factors are guiding the international response to the killing and displacement of civilians in this region? Is the U.N. system an aid or an obstacle?
This program is the second of two sponsored by ASIL as part of the Ralph Bunche Centenary, commemorating the life of this international diplomat and scholar whose work reflected a passionate interest in African affairs.
This panel is open to the public and there is no admission charge. Space is limited; please register by 12:00 noon, July 29th. RSVP: by e-mail to mailto:mstaunton@asil.org or by fax to 202-797-7133, attn: Maria Staunton.
For more information about the American Society of International Law, please visit http://www.asil.org/
The Journal of Negro Education, Special Issues: The Legacy of Ralph J. Bunche and Education: celebrating the Centenary Year of His Birth With the 24th Annual Charles H. Thompson Lecture, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Biden, Joseph, “Ralph Bunche,” The Interdependent , Vol.2 No.1, Spring 2004.
Currier, Nuchhi R., “1950 Ralph Bunche ‘Nation shall not rise up against nation…,” UN Chronicle, Vol. XL, No. 3, September-November 2003.
Ferrazzi, Maria, “Ralph Bunche An American Odyssey,” Living City , Vol. 43 No. 2, February 2004.
Hagey, Keach, “Queens Museum of Art (QMA) Honors life and Legacy of Nobel Laureate Ralph Bunche,” UN Highlights, Quarterly Bulletin, Vol. XXXV, NO.3, July 2004.
Henry, Charles, “Ralph Bunche: American Diplomat,” The Crisis, July/August 2004.
Henry, Charles P. “A World View of Race Revised,” The Journal of Negro Education, Special Issue, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Keppel, Ben, “Thinking Through a Life: Reconsidering the Origins of Ralph J. Bunche,” The Journal of Negro Education, Special Issue, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Lindsay, Beverly, “The Insights of Ralph Bunche for the 21st Century,” The Journal of Negro Education, Special Issue, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Lyman, Princeton N., “Ralph Bunche's International Legacy: The Middle East, and United Nations Peacekeeping,” The Journal of Negro Education , Special Issue, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Rivlin, Benjamin, “Ralph Johnson Bunche – The Master Craftsman,” The International Studies Perspectives, Number 4, 2003.
Scott Holloway, Jonathan, “Ralph Bunche and the Responsibilities of Public Intellectual,” The Journal of Negro Education, Special Issue, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Urquhart, Sir Brian, "A Force Behind the UN," New York Times, Aug 7, 2003.
Walton, Hanes Jr., “The Political Science Educational Philosophy of Ralph Bunche: Theory and Practice,” The Journal of Negro Education , Special Issue, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Biden, Joseph, “Ralph Bunche,” The Interdependent , Vol.2 No.1, Spring 2004
August 7, 2003 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Bunche (1903-1971), internationalist and United Nations peacemaker. From 1954-1971, Mr. Bunche served as a U.N. under-secretary general, the highest office ever held by an American in the international body. In an October 2003 speech on the Senate floor, the Honorable Senator Joseph Biden reiterated the importance of this noble man and, under Senate Concurrent Resolution 82, asked the President to encourage the celebration and memory of Mr. Bunche. "I'd like to thank UNA-USA for reprinting this speech," said Senator Biden. "The Association's impressive dedication to the work of the United Nations and to Mr. Bunche's dream is exactly what this country needs." Following is the text from the Senator's October speech.
"I rise today in recognition of the centenary celebration of Ralph Bunche's birth. Ralph Bunche was an extraordinary man whose success was a definitive accomplishment in the history of America . His grandmother was born into slavery. His father was a barber in a shop for white's only. His mother was a musician. When his mother and father died, his grandmother took him to California where her influence and the perspective she gave him on life and liberty shaped his future and to some extent, the history of the nation…"
*See print version of magazine for full-text article. You can get a free subscription to The InterDependent by becoming a UNA-USA member. Click here for information. Or, you can order individual copies of the magazine by calling 212-907-1300.
Bunche, Ralph Jr., “Memories, Reflections…and Observations,” UN Chronicle , Vol. XL, No. 3, September-November 2003
I was born in Washington , DC in September 1943 about
the time my father was working on African affairs at the United States
Office of Strategic Services. We moved to Parkway Village in Queens ,
New York , at the time the United Nations was established. Most of my
recollections of my father are from that time until he passed away a
month before my marriage to Patricia Hittinger in December 1971. During
the early days of the United Nations, my father was frequently away for
long stretches and rarely home before 9 p.m. Most of our time together
was on weekends, watching sporting events, while he was writing speeches
on Sunday afternoons, or on his regular summer trips to Europe and Asia
on UN business. In mentioning these facts, I do not intend to comment
on my father's work because Sir Brian Urquhart, his friend, colleague
and biographer, is far more capable than I am. What I will do is reflect
on several topics which were of paramount importance to our family and
its development.
My father was a hard taskmaster and disciplinarian. On the top of his
agenda during my childhood was education. This and sports achievement
are what allowed him to make a contribution to the world community, despite
coming from a background that did not have a great deal of financial
resources. He continually drummed into us the importance of education,
hard work and achievement to the best of one's abilities. He believed
that in spite of the prejudices in society, with dedication, perseverance
and hard work, one could do anything one wanted to with life. I will
never forget a call from him one Sunday morning while I was at Colby
College . He said he had called the previous evening only to learn that
I was out at a party. He said that he could not understand why I was
out partying on a Saturday night when I certainly was not receiving top
grades. At first, I thought he was joking, but I soon found out that
he certainly was not! Striving to get the best education and grades possible
was of the utmost importance to his view of life and its possibilities.
My second recollection was his belief in the equality of race and gender,
and that all people were created equal and with hard work could achieve
whatever they set out to achieve. He would not tolerate prejudice of
any kind or any form of bigotry-a characteristic he shared with my wife.
I recall the marches with Martin Luther King, even when his health was
severely faltering, and the incident with the West Side Tennis Club,
which was front page news in The New York Times. We had moved into a
house in Kew Gardens , Queens with the monies from the Nobel Prize and
I was taking lessons at the Club, where the United States Tennis Open
was held annually. We applied for regular membership and I was accepted,
but surprisingly only as an honorary member. This, it turned out, was
because at that time there were no black American members. Of course,
my father turned down the offer and the negative publicity the Club received
quickly helped to change its restrictive policies, but on principle we
never joined. I was one of the first black Americans at a number of schools
I attended: Trinity, Choate and Colby College . Although we never talked
about it, I have always thought that this was another of my Dad's ways
of taking a stand on discrimination and bigotry.
Africa was always central to my father's existence; one of the high points
of my early life was meeting one of his great friends, Jomo Kenyatta,
in his residence in Kenya . I was scheduled one summer to go with my
father to the Congo ; however, because of the disturbances, our trip
together was put off. If my father had been alive today, he would have
been disappointed that the African continent has not progressed as quickly
as it seemed possible in the sixties, and he would be working tirelessly
to try to ensure that its economic and social plight narrowed for the
benefit of Africa and its people, and equally for the health and safety
of the more developed world. My father believed strongly that the African
continent had a great deal to contribute to this world. One only has
to reflect on the importance of a figure such as Nelson Mandela to many
of the people of the world to see this. (I am one of the many who hope
to have the privilege of shaking his hand one day.)
My father had a strong belief in the strength of the United Nations peacekeeping
force in the fifties, when the political realities were quite different
from those of today. I continue to believe that my father would strongly
argue for the merits of the UN peacekeepers if outbreaks and wars are
to continue to be minimized. The world is certainly a better place today
despite our current problems, and the peacekeeping forces have made their
contribution in the past and certainly will in the future. Unfortunately,
they have not been called on in Iraq , but as the balance of powers continue
to shift in the future, I am certain peacekeepers will continue to play
their role in making our world a safer place. Some people may think that
the United Nations and its peacekeepers have seen better days, but I
am quite sure that my Dad would strongly argue that their time will come
again, and quite shortly at that!
Ferrazzi, Maria, “Ralph Bunche An American Odyssey,” Living City , Vol. 43 No. 2, February 2004.
Ralph Johnson Bunche came from a modest family background. Born in Detroit, Michigan to a barbershop owner and an amateur musician, he found himself parentless at the age of twelve. His grandmother “Nana” Johnson, who lived with the family, had been born into slavery. Upon the death of his parents, she took Ralph and his two sisters and moved to Los Angeles where Ralph began to sell newspapers to help with their difficult financial situation. He also served as a “house boy” for a movie star, worked for a carpet-laying firm, and did a number of other odd jobs.
Besides being hard-working and proud, Ralph was endowed with an intellectual capacity that became apparent early, when, in elementary school, he won a prize in history and another in English. He was an all-round athlete and debater at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles and was the valedictorian of his graduating class. His sportsmanship won him a scholarship to the University of California, which he supplemented with a janitorial job to pay for his personal expenses. While playing varsity basketball on championship teams, he found time for debate and campus journalism. In 1927, he graduated summa cum laude with a major in international relations. Once again, he was chosen as valedictorian of his class.
Bunche went on to study political science at Harvard University on a scholarship and a thousand dollars raised by the black community of Los Angeles. In 1934, he presented a comparison of French rule in Togo and Dahomey, a dissertation completed with such distinction that he was awarded the Toppan Prize for outstanding research in social studies. He was the first African American to receive a doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University.
After doing postdoctoral research in anthropology at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics and Cape Town University in South Africa, he dedicated himself to teaching—his real ambition as a young man. He chaired the department of political science at Howard University (1928-1950), taught at Harvard University (1950-1952), served on the New York City Board of Education (1958-1964), and was a trustee to several educational institutes.
Throughout his life, Ralph Bunche was active in the American Civil Rights Movement. He drew from his experience as co-director of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College and from his earlier research to write the book World View of Race (1936). Later, he collaborated with Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and published An American Dilemma (1944). The book forecast many developments in race relations in the USA and almost cost him his life, as he narrowly escaped a lynch mob in Alabama while there doing research.
Although he helped to lead the civil rights march organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, Bunche did not attempt to distinguish himself for a leadership role within that movement. Rather, he preferred to deliver his message with clarity through his speeches and publications. He denounced racial prejudice as an unreasoned phenomenon without any scientific basis. He pointed out that “segregation and democracy are incompatible” and believed that blacks should maintain he struggle for equal rights while accepting the responsibilities that come with freedom.
Although his writings contributed to his enduring fame,
his greatest contribution to America’s
history arises from his service to the U.S. government and to the United
Nations. From adviser to the Department of State and to the military
on Africa and colonial territories during World War II, Bunche moved
to the desk of acting chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs
in the State Department.
Bunche’s service to the U.N. was not a planned career move; he was simply “borrowed” from the State Department by U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie, who placed him in charge of the U.N. Department of Trusteeship to handle problems of the world’s peoples who had not yet achieved self-government. His diplomatic skills became legendary at the U.N., and they were put to the ultimate test from 1947 to 1949 when he was given the most important assignment of his career—the confrontation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. He had been thrust into the role of chief mediator after the assassination of the original appointee, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, who had been killed by a terrorist fusillade in Jerusalem. The negotiating problems were very complex and a truce demanded by the U.N. Security Council had broken down. From the start, the Israeli and Arab delegations were cautious, aloof and occasionally hostile. It proved to be a touch-and-go negotiating marathon that lasted 81 days. Eventually, the force of Dr. Bunche’s personality melted the frigid atmosphere of the talks and an armistice was signed by both delegations.
When it was all over, Col. Mohammed Ibrahim Seif el-Dine of Egypt stated that Dr. Bunche was “one of the greatest men in the world.” Dr. Walter Eytan of Israel supported this view and said that the mediator’s efforts had been “superhuman.” Bunche, in his unassuming way, gave credit to the two delegations and to his staff. The Nobel Prize Committee, however, recognized the crucial role he had played and acknowledged it by bestowing its first peace award to a black man in 1950.
While serving as U.N. undersecretary for Special Political Affairs, and then until his death, as under-Secretary-General, he directed peacekeeping efforts in the Suez area, the Congo, Cyprus, Kashmir and Yemen.
In recognition of Bunche’s political, educational and humanitarian contributions to America, the United Nations, and the world, the Library of the Department of State was dedicated and renamed in his honor on May 5, 1997. Today, his life is celebrated as “An American Odyssey,” as reads the title of the documentary on his life recently shown on PBS prime time and at the Sundance Film Festival.
Finkelstein, S. Lawrence , “Remembering Ralph Bunche,” World Policy Journal , Vol. XX, No. 3 (Fall 2003).
Used with permission of World Policy Institute
If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a
person.
—Ralph Bunche
Diplomats, even those renowned in their lifetimes, are destined, it seems, to be forgotten by fickle publics. So it has proved with Ralph Bunche. In 1950, the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize, New York City gave him a ticker tape parade on Broadway. Today, he has faded from the memory of most. This unjustly forgotten Nobel Laureate deserves recognition more than anyone else for formulating the U.N. principles of peacekeeping. He also helped shape the United Nations Charter, and negotiated the Israeli-Arab armistice lines that endured from 1948 until the Six-Day War in 1967. His biographer and longtime U.N. colleague, Brian Urquhart, called Bunche (who died in 1971) the most remarkable public servant he had known.
He left his mark at home as well as abroad. An African American, born a century ago in Detroit , Bunche was an early campaigner for civil rights and a principal collaborator with the eminent Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in preparing the landmark study, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).
It was this writer's good fortune to have worked under Dr. Bunche when, as a civil servant in the State Department and the U.N. Secretariat, he was helping to plan the United Nations and then bring it to life. Perhaps his most significant characteristic was his drive to excel. It was there from childhood, and he drove himself harder than anyone else. This seemingly inherent instinct was reinforced by the conviction that he could help his race by showing that a black man could be an achiever in a white society.
His stamina was phenomenal. His recollection of the first round of armistice negotiations between Israel and Egypt on the island of Rhodes illustrates the point. He told friends that conditions were primitive. The facilities of the Hôtel des Roses were limited. The cuisine was execrable. At the final stage of negotiations, the participants were stretched to the limit. All suffered from dysentery, including himself. But as he remarked, “I was the strongest. I outlasted them.” He exercised his prerogative in chairing the meeting to keep all parties negotiating nonstop until they could no longer resist agreement. Thus, according to its recipient, was the Nobel Prize won. 1
He was modest in demeanor and shunned ostentation. He wanted to turn down the prize, saying that those who served the United Nations did not do so for personal rewards. Secretary General Trygve Lie had to order him to accept because doing so would benefit the newborn organization. Dr. Bunche's reluctance by no means meant that he felt insecure . He knew he had achieved a great deal and showed his pride in small ways. He would, for example, point to the gold ucla basketballs adorning the chain attached to his vest—tokens of his place on the ucla team that won the Southern Conference championship three years running.
He was loyal to his friends, to the institutions he served, and to his convictions. He believed in rules, but could bend them when required by his convictions. Thus, during the San Francisco Conference in 1945 at which the United Nations was launched, he surreptitiously passed to an Australian delegate the draft declaration of principles for governing dependent territories, classified “secret,” that the U.S. delegation was not authorized to introduce. This draft in essence became Chapter XI of the U.N. Charter.
He was a tough and resilient negotiator. Once he reached a conclusion, he stood behind it stubbornly. Once, at a critical moment during a very tense international crisis, he said he knew he was doing the right thing because he was taking flak from both sides. His sense of humor, especially his ability to laugh at himself, proved a solvent for tension. He loved and enjoyed people, though he could be scathing in his private appraisals. He suffered stoically when differences divided him from treasured colleagues. He was a good talker and an excellent listener. The latter attribute was perhaps most important in explaining his success as a diplomat. He quickly grasped another negotiator's bottom line, and showed extraordinary skill in phrasing the ideas that bridge the differences between opponents. He had no superiors as a diplomatic draftsman.
He kept secrets scrupulously. As a negotiator, he inspired trust and could be relied upon to keep his word. Brian Urquhart recalls that at one point after wresting agreement during Israeli-Arab Truce negotiations, he remarked that he was about to destroy all notes of his confidential talks with contending delegates so that in the future none might be embarrassed. Although suffering spells of bitter depression when things were going badly, he was essentially an optimist. He believed throughout his career that the world could and would be a better place. He served his causes completely, at great cost to his always fragile health, despite contention with colleagues whom he respected, and notwithstanding the pain caused his family by the priority he gave to his humanitarian mission.
The Ladder Upward
First, last and always, Ralph Bunche saw himself as a Negro (the preferred term during his lifetime), proudly and without reservation He was greatly influenced by his devoted grandmother Nana, whose pride in her identity provided a model for her grandson. He suffered from, and resented, racial segregation, and always sought to overcome it for “my group.”
Young Ralph excelled as a student in Detroit , and then in Los Angeles , where his family moved in 1917. He graduated summa cum laude, from UCLA and was class valedictorian; he had been a debater, a varsity athlete, and a contributor to the college newspaper, all the while working to earn his keep. After going on to graduate school at Harvard, he became in 1934 the university's first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in government, having written a prize-winning dissertation. Initially, he had proposed a thesis on the League of Nations and the suppression of slavery. Then he considered comparing Brazil 's multiracialism with America 's continued segregation. Finally, he settled on a thesis that contrasted France 's administration of two African territories: Dahomey , then an outright French possession, and neighboring Togoland, which France administered under a League of Nations mandate. His dissertation anticipated the themes— Africa , race, colonialism, and international organizations—that proved central to his career in the years to follow.
Further field studies in 1936–37, mainly in Africa , broadened his skills and strengthened his resume. To prepare for his travels, he became the postdoctoral student of three leading anthropologists, Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University, Bronislaw Malinowski at the University of London, and Isaac Shapera at the University of Capetown. While in London , he met many Africans who were destined for leadership, among them Jomo Kenyatta, later to become Kenya 's first president, with whom he studied Swahili. Among Ralph Bunche's legacies are 14,000 feet of film he shot in Africa with a camera lent to him by Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson's wife. 2
His Harvard studies intermingled with a very different professional career as a faculty member at Howard University in Washington , D.C. , beginning in 1928 after he received his M.A. from. He soon founded and chaired the political science department at the university. He wrote prolifically about race and civil rights, including A World View of Race (1936) and the four major studies he contributed to Myrdal's American Dilemma. Howard's cadre of leading black intellectuals not only provided stimulus to the young scholar but also inspired him to become a leading activist on these issues. In 1936, he co-founded the National Negro Congress, which grew out of a conference at Howard on “The Position of the Negro in the Present Economic Crisis.”
It was his growing reputation as an Africanist and student of colonialism that prompted an invitation to join the U.S. government. He made the move because, unlike other black leaders, he believed that the European war and Nazism threatened African Americans as well other Americans. He thus accepted an offer to join the Office of Coordinator of Information as a senior civil service analyst in the Africa and Far East section. When oci became the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS ) in 1942, he was named chief of the Africa section in the research and analysis branch. Impressed by his work, senior State Department executives overcame resistance to the appointment of a black official and arranged his transfer to State's postwar planning unit. He joined the U.S. delegations to a number of major conferences concerned with postwar international institutions. His performance in dealing with the issues of colonialism at the San Francisco Conference at which the United Nations Charter was approved led to his being recruited by the U.N. Secretariat in April 1946 as acting director of the Trusteeship Division. That December, he became a full-fledged international civil servant as the division's director. Thereafter, he served the United Nations with total dedication almost until his death a quarter century later.
Bunche's job performance earned him appointment, which he did not relish, to the committee set up in 1947 to resolve the future status of Palestine . When the committee could not decide between partition and federation, he managed the remarkable feat of drafting proposals for each in the committee's report to the General Assembly. What he learned then about the Middle East, and about how the United Nations worked, stood him in good stead when, with Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Mediator, he negotiated various Arab-Israeli truces in 1948. The truces required impartial supervision, and the task fell to Dr. Bunche, who without precedents to aid him, had to create the organization's first peacekeeping operation, the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, or untso , which remains in operation to this day.
When the Swedish diplomat was assassinated in September 1948, Bunche became acting mediator. (But for an unforeseen delay that prevented Bunche from sharing the same vehicle in Jerusalem, both men might have been slain by a Jewish extremist opposed to partition). 3 He was thus in place to perform his Nobel Prize-winning feat of concluding armistices in 1949 between Israel and four of its Arab neighbors, in extended negotiations on the Island of Rhodes.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 required insertion of a multinational peacekeeping force as a buffer between Israel and Egypt . Bunche had a major role in creating and guiding UNEF, the United Nations Emergency Force, drawing on the guidelines already laid down for UNTSO. He also authored the “peacekeeping manual” used by the United Nations for decades. Until his death in 1971, he was the United Nations chief troubleshooter, a role he performed in Lebanon , Bahrain , the Congo , Cyprus , and Kashmir .
Ralph Bunche's career was marked by breadth of vision. He fought for Negro rights, and seeing them as universal human rights. He firmly believed that what he did for his race served America , and that his service to America was good for his race. He saw that peace was more than the avoidance of war. He stated his credo relatively early in his career, in 1942: “The real objective must always be the good life for all of the people…peace, bread, adequate clothing, education, good health and, above all, the right to walk with dignity on the world's great boulevards.” He worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the revolutionary U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. He was always proudly an American who dreamed the American dream of democracy. He knew that as an international civil servant he served both his country and the world.
The world today sorely needs Ralph Bunche's gifts, his worldview, his passion honed by tact, his intelligence informed by experience, his prestige at home and abroad, and his devotion to his favorite Scriptural passage, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
NOTES
1. Author's recollection of a conversation at Lake Success after Dr. Bunche's return from Rhodes, some time in 1949 2. Some of that footage appears in A Black Scholar Investigates Colonialism, one of 14 modules based on the documentary film Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey, produced by William Greaves and shown on the Public Broadcasting System.
3. Bunche recounted this episode in “The Psychology of Humanity: A Conversation with Ralph Bunche and Mary Harrington Hall,” Psychology Today, April 1969, pp. 4–5; see also Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 178.
Jeffrey, David K. J., “A Model for Today's International Civil Servant,” UN Chronicle Volume XL, Number 3, 2003
"I am a professional optimist", Ralph Bunche told journalists at Nicosia International Airport at the conclusion of a visit in July 1966 to view the peacekeeping operations in Cyprus. "If I were not a professional optimist through 21 years in the United Nations service, mainly in conflict areas-Palestine, Congo, here and in Kashmir-I would be crazy. You have to be optimistic in this work or get out of it. … That is, optimistic in the sense of assuming that there is no problem-Cyprus or any other-which cannot be solved, and that, therefore, you have to keep at it persistently and you have to have confidence that it can be solved."1
Widely hailed, among his many accomplishments, as a great international civil servant, American and citizen of the world, Ralph Johnson Bunche's life story is one full of inspiration to all engaged in the pursuit of peace. As a year-long programme marking the 100th anniversary of his birth in Detroit, Michigan, commences to celebrate and build upon the legacy of this diplomat, scholar and internationalist, it is timely for the current staff of the United Nations, to which Ralph Bunche devoted 25 years of his spectacular career, to reflect on one of its most famous and optimistic alumni. A visible reminder of the esteem with which he is regarded within the United Nations and the City of New York is the Ralph Bunche Park located directly opposite the UN Secretariat building.
Many staff members who pass this memorial, however, may not be fully aware of his great legacy. Such reflection is timely because in 2003, when the Iraq crisis was added to the long list of conflicts with which the Organization has been confronted, the relevance and even future of the United Nations has again been scrutinized and questioned. However, within the Organization, while the mood may have at times been troubled, the outlook was much more positive. An unofficial survey of staff members revealed that 80 per cent did not see the crisis as making the United Nations irrelevant. Further, 60 per cent felt optimistic about its future, while only 20 per cent were decidedly pessimistic. So, during these challenging times, what can be gleaned from Ralph Bunche's views on the meaning of being an international civil servant and how can they be pursued by his current successors?
Staff members today are required to make the same commitment to the United Nations, as did all their predecessors. As international civil servants, they are charged with translating into reality the ideals of the United Nations and its specialized agencies, as enshrined in the UN Charter. UN staff are part of the international civil service which "relies on the great traditions of public administration that have grown up in Member States: competence, integrity, impartiality, independence and discretion. But over and above this, international civil servants have a special calling: to serve the ideals of peace, of respect for fundamental rights, of economic and social progress, and of international cooperation."2
It was this same calling to which Ralph Bunche responded in 1946 when he was asked by then UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie to leave his senior role at the United States State Department and join the fledgling United Nations, in charge of the Department of Trusteeship, where he would oversee post-war decolonization efforts.
Having grown up in material poverty but in a family rich in spirit, imbued with a sense of pride in his identity as a black American, but very conscious of racial inequalities, Ralph Bunche had all the makings of a fine international civil servant. His great achievements in political science, as a student at the University of California in Los Angeles and Harvard University, then as a professor at Howard University, and his study tour of colonial policy in Africa, would equip him very well for his future career. He lived through the international turmoil of the Second World War and the domestic struggles of the nascent civil rights movement. His own ideals as a young man would come to be reflected by those adopted by the United Nations and subsequently by sweeping social reforms in the United States. He arrived on the international scene at a time that would prove most fortuitous for the emerging Organization, playing significant roles in its founding and the drafting of its Charter.
Ralph Bunche clearly had the highest regard for the United Nations, choosing to spend the majority of his working life as part of the UN Secretariat from 1946 until ill health forced his retirement in 1971. His views on the meaning of being an international civil servant can be identified not only from his speeches and writings but, perhaps even more cogently, from his actions.
As one of his biographers observed: "The civil rights movement was terribly important to black Americans and to Ralph, but he had placed his faith in and was determined to devote himself to the United Nations and the emerging dependent territories, seeking a higher goal than the equality of one people."3 Having made this choice, he reaffirmed it when he declined to move back to Washington, DC to join the Truman Administration, preferring instead to remain at the United Nations. He saw in the Organization an opportunity to serve not just his fellow black Americans but the peoples of the world, and not merely the Government of his country but an international organization, of which the United States was a founding member, where his working allegiance would lie with the United Nations itself.
Today, as when Ralph Bunche served, UN Secretariat staff members are required to be guided by the principles of the Organization. "The values that are enshrined in the United Nations organizations must also be those that guide international civil servants in all their actions: fundamental human rights, social justice, the dignity and worth of the human person and respect for the equal rights of men and women and of nations great and small." As international civil servants, they are also required to "share the vision of their organizations".
It is "loyalty to this vision that ensures the integrity and international outlook of international civil servants; it guarantees that they will place the interests of their organization above their own…"2 What is the vision of the United Nations, and how does it compare to the time when Ralph Bunche served? In 1946, the United Nations that Bunche joined was, of course, initially focused on dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War. The broad vision at that time was probably commensurate with its newly crafted goals. These are found in the Preamble to the UN Charter, which affirms the Organization's determination "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, … to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom".
It was peacekeeping, the development of which he greatly influenced, that would primarily occupy Ralph Bunche during his tenure at the United Nations. This vision for the world remains the same, although it now needs to be interpreted and applied by the United Nations in a world still beset by war-numerous regional and civil conflicts-as well as, arguably, a greater array of social and environmental problems, and the challenges posed by globalization. More specific objectives consistent with these broad goals have recently been described by the Secretary-General in the Millennium Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 2000, in which Member States expressed assuredness as to the relevance of the United Nations and confidence in its ability to achieve a wide-ranging and challenging agenda. Members reaffirmed their commitment to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, whose "relevance and capacity to inspire have increased, as nations and peoples have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent". They declared that they "solemnly reaffirm, on this historic occasion, that the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development. We therefore pledge our unstinting support for these common objectives and our determination to achieve them."4
With different opportunities beckoning, Ralph Bunche expressly chose the path of an international civil servant. His belief that the scourge of war could best be banished by cooperation and understanding among nations marked him as an internationalist. He was not simply someone who took an active interest in world affairs, but he steadfastly believed in the power of international cooperation to work for the betterment of mankind. Such cooperation continues to be required from UN staff members, as stressed in the 2002 Standards of Conduct for the International Civil Service, although now in the context of a much broader range of activities than the United Nations originally pursued.
In accepting the 50th Nobel Peace Prize in December 1950, Ralph Bunche recognized the need for such cooperation: "There are many who figuratively stand beside me today and who are also honoured here. I am but one of many cogs in the United Nations, the greatest peace organization ever dedicated to the salvation of mankind's future on earth. It is, indeed, itself an honour to be enabled to practise the arts of peace under the aegis of the United Nations."
United Nations staff members today can still identify with these sentiments. At times they may often feel like one of the many "cogs" in the machinery of the United Nations. But as Ralph Bunche recognized, each cog working cooperatively is essential to transfer energy throughout the Organization. He had also devoted himself to civil work, that "of or relating to ordinary citizens". He was called to a career of interna-tional public service-rather than one in the domestic government or private sectors-a career where he could seek to "serve the ideals of peace, of respect for fundamental rights, of economic and social progress, and of international cooperation". These objectives were fundamentally consistent with his upbringing, education and philosophy on life. His stage progressively widened; however, his values appear to have remained constant. And in the other meaning of "civil", namely "courteous and polite", he is routinely described by his biographers and colleagues as dignified, even-tempered, soft-spoken, considerate, modest, sincere and trustful. Such qualities continue to be highly regarded within the UN Secretariat and beyond.
His dedication to the ideals and work of the United Nations epitomizes the concept of service. Ralph Bunche's preparedness to work long hours and with enormous energy is legendary. He put the interests of the United Nations far above his own, accepting whatever new challenge was given to him. As today's staff members will readily understand, there must have been times when he questioned his ability to take on some of these assignments, simply in terms of workload if not his possession of the requisite knowledge and skills. And yet, each time, he rose to the occasion and seized each new assignment with confidence and optimism.
So Ralph Bunche, the professional optimist, was true to his own beliefs. He persisted through numerous challenges with the confidence that "there is no problem which cannot be solved". A prime example was when he was plunged into the role of Acting Mediator in Palestine following the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 and achieved a series of armistice agreements following gruelling negotiations. That same outlook is abundantly evident among his successors. Their individual approaches to the role of being an international civil servant today no doubt differ widely. But the same spirit of optimism and dedication is widespread. Each person privileged to work for the United Nations will have his or her own way of realizing the broad vision of the Organization and its specific goals.
Vision can be exercised from any vantage point within the institution, from any cog in the wheel. The fact that each staff member's perspective, in part, will necessarily be individual and tailored to his or her specific tasks can still contribute to and enhance the breadth of United Nations vision as a whole. Such vision may be exercised in a peacekeeping mission redolent of those Ralph Bunche spent most of his career serving. Or it may be honed and realized in many different disciplines and locations, some dangerous and some not. All who share such vision are united in the same common calling that Ralph Bunche first heard more than fifty years ago.
Among the far-reaching legacies of Ralph Bunche are that, like other early members of the UN Secretariat, he helped by his actions to establish a standard of conduct for all international civil servants, shared in the vision of the United Nations, and had an unshakable belief in its relevance to mankind. In that way, he lives on at the United Nations. For, as reiterated by Member States in the Millennium Declaration, such an approach to the role of an international civil servant, especially one privileged to work for the United Nations, remains as valid and meaningful today as in Dr. Bunche's era.
Notes
1 "Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey", Sir Brian Urquhart,
W.W. Norton & Co., (1998), p.373.
2 Standards of Conduct for the International Civil Service, International
Civil Service Commission, January 2002.
3 "Ralph Bunche: A Most Reluctant Hero", Jim Haskins, Hawthorn
Books, (1974), p.98.
4 Millennium Declaration, 2000.
Rivlin, Benjamin, “Ralph Johnson Bunche. Brief life of a champion of human dignity: 1903-1971,” Harvard Magazine , Nov-Dec 2003
In the fall of 1927, the small group of black students at Harvard learned of the impending arrival of an exceptionally gifted new black graduate student from Los Angeles . Ralph Johnson Bunche lived up to his advance notices. Robert C. Weaver '29, Ph.D. '34, LL.D. '64—later the first black presidential cabinet member—reported, “What impressed me most about Ralph was his optimism…based on a long history of overcoming obstacles and an uncanny ability to produce stupendous amounts of work over long sustained periods….”
Orphaned at 13, Bunche was raised by his maternal grandmother, “Nana,” who instilled within him pride in his race and the notion that he “could do it.” When he was assigned to a vocational track in high school, she protested, “Ralph [is] going to college!” He excelled in the academic program, though he was excluded from the citywide honor society because of his race. At UCLA, he stood out as a student and athlete. In his valedictory address, he foresaw his future role as a “scholar-activist,” telling classmates: “Man learns and knows, but he does not do as well as he knows….”
Having earned a master's in government in 1928, Bunche joined the Howard University faculty, then the intellectual powerhouse of Negro America. There he established and chaired the political science department and met his future wife, Ruth Ethel Harris. He focused on race relations, civil rights, and colonialism, which he saw as a continuum of the struggle to secure racial equality and dignity for all people in America and throughout the world.
The 1930s were filled with teaching, research, and activism. He helped establish the National Negro Congress with A. Philip Randolph, organized a protest against a production of Porgy and Bess at Washington's segregated National Theater, prepared a report for the Republican Party program committee on why Negroes had deserted the party of Lincoln, and served as Gunnar Myrdal's chief research associate on the Carnegie Corporation-sponsored study published as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy. He also published his own perceptive monograph A World View of Race, positing that “race is a social concept which can be and is employed effectively to rouse and rationalize emotions [and] an admirable device for the cultivation of group prejudices.”
After research on colonialism in West Africa , Bunche completed his Harvard Ph.D. in 1934, winning the Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. In 1936, he broadened his fieldwork with a trip to East Africa . (To prepare, he studied Swahili in London with Jomo Kenyatta, the future president of Kenya .) He also visited the Union of South Africa. Recognizing the anomaly a black American social scientist presented in that country, he wrote, “any American Negro visiting South Africa is a missionary whether or not he wills it. But he doesn't have to be a religious missionary.” The negative self-image he found among the nonwhite majority concerned him; although his primary purpose was anthropological research, he gave “pep talks” to bolster African self-esteem. To Bunche, the conditions of colonial peoples throughout the world paralleled the condition of blacks in his own country, subject to racism and economic deprivation. The Urban League's Vernon Jordan noted that he was “an inspirational beacon to young black people for decades…in the forefront of those building new black consciousness in the thirties and forties.” Later Bunche would turn down high appointments from Presidents Harry Truman and John Kennedy, letting it be known that he did not wish to live in then Jim-Crow Washington. Historian John Hope Franklin credits him with “creating a new category of leadership among African- Americans” due to his unique ability “to take the power and prestige he accumulated…to address the problems of his community.”
Bunche's road to world prominence started two months before Pearl Harbor , when he was recruited to work on colonial problems and Africa for what became the Office of Strategic Services. Then came calls in 1944 to the State Department (where he was the first black professional officer), to the San Francisco Conference in 1945 that drafted the UN Charter, and to the UN Secretariat in 1946 as director of the Trusteeship Department. In 1950, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful mediation of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: the first time the prize was conferred on a UN affiliate and the .rst recognition by that Nobel committee of any person of color. Ebony magazine called him “The Most Honored Negro in the World.” Harvard had already recognized him with an honorary degree in 1949 and offered a tenured professorship in 1950. But by then Bunche had become indispensable to UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and later U Thant. As under secretary-general, he played a major role in the many UN peace-keeping operations organized during his lifetime.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said, “As he confronted every tough challenge of his personal and professional life, Ralph Bunche acted on his deeply held conviction that every human being has the capacity to overcome obstacles and to change the world for the better.” As Bunche himself told his Nobel audience, “I…believe in the essential goodness of my fellow man, which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble.”
Benjamin Rivlin, Ph.D. '49, co-chair of the Ralph Bunche Centenary Commemoration Committee, is director emeritus of the Bunche Institute for International Studies and professor of political science emeritus at the City University of New York , Graduate School and University Center .
Urquhart, Sir Brian, "May I Speak a Word or Two Against Brotherhood?," UN Chronicle, Volume XL, Number 3, 2003
The 7th of August 2003 marked the centenary of the birth of Ralph Johnson Bunche, the first United Nations recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and an individual who was, as Brian Urquhart recalls in his tribute, "present at the creation" of the Organization and who at the time of his death in 1971 was hailed as "an international institution in his own right."
Ralph Bunche was present at the creation of the United Nations as a member of the United States State Department group that began the drafting of the UN Charter under the direction of Leo Pasvolsky. At the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, he was the principal drafter of Chapters XI (Declaration regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories) and XII (International Trusteeship System). Bunche came to the UN Secretariat as an expert on colonialism-and on the decolonization that was soon to come-and trusteeship.
His first task at the United Nations was to set up the Trusteeship Department. Palestine was a League of Nations mandate and could, theoretically, have become a Trust Territory. In 1947, Secretary-General Trygve Lie sent Bunche as his personal representative with the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP). Finding the members of UNSCOP "just about the worst group I have ever had to work with", he finally wrote both the majority (partition) and the minority reports (federation)-"a ghost-writing harlot", he noted.
The Partition Plan was adopted by the General Assembly in November 1947. Ralph Bunche believed he had seen the last of the Palestine problem, but in May 1948 the British left Palestine, the State of Israel was declared, and five Arab armies invaded the new Jewish State. The Security Council called for a truce and appointed a mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, and Trygve Lie sent Bunche to help him. To pin down an uneasy truce, Bunche set up the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), which is still in existence, and in doing so formulated the basic principles of what later became peacekeeping. He was the inseparable companion and adviser of the Mediator, but on 17 September 1948 a series of delays and aircraft breakdowns
Count Bernadotte and the French observer who took Bunche's place were assassinated on their way back from Government House by the extremist Stern Gang. Bunche succeeded as Mediator and on the island of Rhodes negotiated armistice agreements between Israel and its four Arab neighbours, a feat that was widely regarded as impossible and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Characteristically, Bunche was inclined to turn down the Prize on the grounds that he had simply been doing his job, but Trygve Lie instructed him to accept it for the good of the Organization.
Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld made Bunche Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs; his new responsibilities included critical negotiating and mediating assignments, as well as the organization and direction of peacekeeping operations.
During the Suez crisis in 1956, the first UN peace-keeping force-UN Emergency Force in the Middle East (UNEFI)-arrived in the Suez Canal area one week after the General Assembly's decision to establish it.
When asked if this extraordinary haste was due to the fear of Soviet "volunteers" arriving in the area, Bunche replied: "We wanted to demonstrate that the United Nations resolution was not an empty gesture and to avoid the development of a vacuum in the area … We had a resolution, but I think not many people thought that very much could be done quickly about it."
With the same driving sense of urgency, Bunche organized the observer group-UNOGIL-during the very dangerous crisis in Lebanon in 1958 and the peacekeeping force in Cyprus-UNFICYP-in 1964. He personally directed the large and complex operation in the Congo ONUC-in 1960, for which 3,000 UN troops arrived in the country within four days of the Security Council decision to establish the force.
Bunche called Dag Hammarskjöld "the most remarkable man I have ever seen or worked with", and they became a strong working team. The Secretary-General's death in Africa on 17 September 1961-the same date on which Count Bernadotte had been assassinated 13 years before-was a crushing blow to Bunche, who on both occasions took the lead in rallying a shocked and disconsolate UN Secretariat to get on with the job.
Bunche was the main support of Hammarskjöld's successor, U Thant and, much against his will, renounced his intention to leave the United Nations and go back to work on civil rights because U Thant refused to accept his resignation.
I have mentioned a few highlights of Ralph Bunche's UN career. His modesty was such that his UN colleagues knew little or nothing of his earlier achievements.
Born in Detroit, where his father was an itinerant barber, Bunche was orphaned at eleven and brought up by a formidable grandmother in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Success at school, both as student and athlete, took him to the University of California in Los Angeles and as a graduate student to Harvard University. Colonialism was the subject of his prize-winning doctoral thesis, and he did field work in Cameroon, French Togo, South Africa, Kenya and the Congo. His writings on the race problem in the United States were an important prelude to the civil rights movement. In A World View of Race (1936), he made an original analysis of the parallels between the race problem in the United States and the global phenomenon of colonialism. Bunche set up the Political Science Department at Howard University, where he was an influential professor and teacher. He was Gunnar Myrdal's chief assistant and researcher in producing the classic "An Second World War, as America's foremost expert on the colonial world, he worked in the United States Office of Strategic Services until he moved in 1944 to the State Department, where he was the first black official.
Bunche brought to his work at the United Nations the vitality, integrity and spirit of a remarkable family, the intellect of a scholar, the analytical mind and the experience of a political scientist who had worked mostly in the field, and the passion for justice and freedom of a member of an oppressed minority. Throughout his years of success and public acclaim, he remained, as he had always been, down-to earth, humorous, kind and unpretentious. As I said at his funeral: "The grander he got, the nicer and more relaxed he became."
Bunche was more concerned with achieving results than with getting the credit for them, more interested in people than in celebrities, and more moved by the struggles of the young, the oppressed and the disadvantaged than by the caprices and favours of the powerful and the famous. He was intensely proud of being both American and black, but was strongly critical of America's failures, especially in regard to his own people. He was convinced that full integration into the American society was the only valid objective-indeed the only realistic option-for African Americans.
Bunche never wavered in his conviction that the United Nations must, and could, be made to work. He probably did more than anyone to give substance to this conviction. He detested bigotry and injustice. He believed passionately in the independence of the Secretariat, and strongly resisted improper pressure from Governments, especially his own. By nature a kindly man, he was ruthless with any hint of dishonesty, impropriety or disloyalty to the United Nations. He was intolerant of sloppy or superficial work. His powerful analytical mind worked through and ahead of problems, and he instantly saw through ingenious but unsound notions, slick ideas or devious manoeuvres.
Bunche was a supremely responsible man. Regardless of fatigue or inconvenience, he never gave up on a problem until he was convinced that he had made every possible effort to resolve it. He was usually the first to arrive and the last to leave, and he insisted on being awakened for emergency night calls. He accepted physical risk as a matter of course. In the field, his courage and determination were an inspiration. He greatly enjoyed, but only in the privacy of his own office, the not infrequent comic or farcical aspects of the situations and the people he dealt with.
Bunche disliked sanctimonious or misleading approaches to life's problems. "May I speak a word or two against brotherhood?", he said in one of his last interviews. "Brotherhood is a misused, misleading term. We can save the world with a lot less. … What we need in this world is not brotherhood but coexistence. We need acceptance of the right of every person to his own dignity. We need mutual respect." He liked his fellow human beings. He believed in them and devoted his life to helping them to resolve their conflicts and their difficulties. When he died in 1971, Secretary-General U Thant hailed him as "an international institution in his own right". The General Assembly stood for a minute of silence in his honour.
Ralph Johnson Bunche: Nobel Laureate a Centennial Retrospective
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York
August 7 - October 26, 2003
Ralph Bunche
1903-1971 Visionary for World Peace
United Nations, New York
October 8, – November 22, 2003
Ralph
Bunche: The Legend and the Legacy
The Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
, New York
December 10, February 28, 2004
“…the
great good that is in us”
A Centenary Celebration of Ralph J. Bunche
UCLA, Charles E. Young Research Library
January-March 2004
Dr.
Ralph Johnson Bunche
“Commemorating the Man, the Institution, the Great Example of Our Time” 2003-2004
University of the West Indies (Mona), Jamaica
February 27, 2004
The Queens Museum of Art
Ralph Bunche: Diplomat for Peace and Justice
April 11 – July 4, 2004
Smithsonian, National Museum of American History
Ralph Bunche: African American/Global Visionary
September 3, 2004 – January 24, 2005
Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
NAACP 95th Annual Convention
Philadelphia
Ralph Bunche photo exhibit and book display
July 10-15, 2004
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- Ralph Bunche Scholars Summer Institute
- Ralph Bunche Summer Institute at Duke University
- Ralph Bunche Summer Institute at Wayne State University
- Ralph Bunche, Twelve Teaching Video Modules
- Ralph Bunche United Nations Internship Grant
- Ralph Bunche – A Unit of Study for Grades 9-12
- Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Summer Enrichment Program
- Ralph J. Bunche Scholarship in Peace and Conflict Studies
- The Philip Merrill Fellowship
- 2003 UNA-USA National High School Essay Contest
Ralph Bunche – Infinite Patience, Indomitable Will. His Struggle for Peace and Justice . A Unit of Study for Grades 9-12
The UCLA-based National Center for History in the Schools has published a 180-page planning guide for teachers of grades 9–12 that follows Bunche's life and career. Infinite Patience, Indomitable Will: Ralph Bunche--His Struggle for Peace and Justice is presented to coincide with the centennial of the birth of Ralph Bunche, an African American who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951 for his work at the United Nations in brokering an Arab-Israeli armistice in 1949. Through the five lessons students will explore the life, accomplishments, and legacy of Ralph Bunche treat the young Bunche acquiring an education in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Mass; his early involvement with black political life in the United States; his role in ending the first Arab-Israeli War while working as the acting United Nations mediator; his U.N. work during the Congo crisis of 1960; and a review of his later years as well as his connections to the 1960s Civil Rights movement.
For more details and order form click here.
Ralph J. Bunche Scholarship in Peace and Conflict Studies
The Center for Peace and Conflict Studies in the College of Urban , Labor and Metropolitan Affairs is proud to announce the development of the Ralph J. Bunche Scholarship in Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University .
The purpose of this fund is to support minority students wishing to study peace and obtain conflict management skills in the tradition of the great diplomat, Nobel Peace laureate, and distinguished Detroiter, Ralph Bunche. Dr. Bunche overcame the challenges of poverty to attain the highest educational distinction and launch a monumental career as a pioneer in the fields of race relations and civil rights, African decolonization and international peacekeeping. He engineered the first Middle East armistice accords and rose to the rank of United Nations Undersecretary General.
Dr. Bunche's life touched every relevant social issue of the 20th century, and with your help we propose to make his legacy relevant to the next generations of students and national leaders through this endowment at Wayne State University .
For more information please visit: http://www.pcs.wayne.edu