In 1988, I spent the months of May till September at the United Nations in New York on leave from the University of Uppsala to finish my history of the United Nations since Dag Hammarskjold. I was due back at the University on October 1. Still, on the previous Sunday, at my farewell party, Jebat Gana, Singapore's Permanent Representative at the UN (and now its Secretary General), asked me to stay at least one extra week. The Africa Crisis, which was tearing the UN apart, was reaching its climax, and Jebat Gana urged me to write a history of those fateful years as speedily as possible so that it could serve as a guide to those charged with the task of reconstructing or, more correctly, restructuring the global system.
I took his advice. With his help, I could observe those climatic years at close quarters which destroyed the post-1945 international order and left us groping for a new and sustainable global system today. I found no shortage of information about the events that led up to this global upheaval. No comparable event in human history has been so thoroughly publicized. As the Africa Crisis became a struggle for men's minds it was increasingly conducted in public on international television and radio. The tapes of these broadcasts by leading characters at crucial moments provide a basis on which a contemporary historian can reconstruct events in a way that was never possible when state documents, newspaper accounts, and personal recollections were the main sources.
I have been further assisted by another development in modern communications: the surreptitious recording of meetings between ministers, ambassadors and officials. The habit of doing so became public knowledge at the time of Watergate and since that time the practice has become far more widespread. An unexpectedly large number of secret verbatim transcripts have been made available to me by, for example, the investigative committee of the US Congress which was set up after tapes of a secret meeting between the Sectary of the US Treasury and the British Chancellor of the Exchequer were broadcast. In several other countries changes of government in recent months have produced new administrations which are not in the least concerned with keeping their predecessors' secrets. I have made free use of all this material. Additionally, Ambassador Gana gave me access to his diary which was a mine of information about the creation of an alternative Africa-led world order based on the power of that continent's population.
Yet I must say that the unveiling of such private and secret material adds comparatively little to our knowledge of the origins of the conflict. There was no conspiracy, only ignorance in the face of abundant information. If there is one lesson that needs to be learned at the current World Conference on Restructuring it is that to prevent conflict information is not enough, understanding is also required.889Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5TsCmvq3OM
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Leon Strandberg, August 1, 1988889Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJgFAU1KCCp
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