Workers World, Vol. 2 No. 18
Where was the UN when the murderous Verwoerd regime of South Africa opened fire in Sharpeville against tens of thousands of defenseless South African people, killing many, wounding hundreds, and imprisoning thousands? Where was Dag Hammarskjöld at that time? Where was the vociferous Henry Cabot Lodge? Where was Ralph Bunche?
Did the UN Security Council at that time meet in a pre-dawn session and at breakneck speed dispatch an international police force to Johannesburg or Capetown? Did the international police force seize the airports of Johannesburg as they did in Leopoldville? Did they take over the railroads, telegraph, and radio communication centers? Did they push aside the apartheid butcher of the South African people, the premier of the Union of South Africa, in the name of “restoring law and order”?
Merely to ask the questions is to answer them.
But oh, how different is the case in the Congo! Here the UN did meet in pre-dawn session and did at literally breakneck speed dispatch an international police force, which did take over the airfield in Leopoldville, did illegally seize the nation’s communication centers, lodged their soldiers at all strategic economic centers of the country, and to heap indignity upon indignity, rudely took over the nation’s radio networkers and even refused to permit the legally elected Premier Lumumba to speak in his own country on the radio!
And finally, to top it all off, did Dag Hammarskjöld even so much as suggest the disarming of the white supremacist South African army as he has been systematically disarming the Congolese?
“... Reports indicate that villages have been pillaged and burnt and their inhabitants – men, women, and children – killed. United Nations officials were informed that unarmed persons were deliberately killed ... These actions obviously cannot be viewed merely as examples of internal political conflict. They involve a most flagrant violation of elementary human rights and have the characteristics of the crime of genocide, since they appear to be directed toward the extermination of a specific ethnic group ...”
What a truthful ring is contained in practically every word of the above lines! How well they fit the well-known imperialist pattern!
These words are from a report of Dag Hammarskjöld, delivered at the UN Security Council on September 9. But who is he condemning? Who is he denouncing? The Verwoerd regime? The Belgian regime? The De Gaulle regime in Algiers? The British regime in Kenya?
On no, dear reader, he is denouncing, defaming, and scandalizing the revolutionary soldiers of the Congolese liberation army! And who is he presumably defending? The Baluba tribe! Dag Hammarskjöld, banker and big businessman, tool of Wall Street, Lombard Street, the Paris Bourse, and international contact man for Scandinavian finance capital, now dressed in the shining armor of a night, has become the defender of the Baluba tribesman!
In all these many years when the Belgians carried out an absolutely unprecedented campaign of extermination of the Balubas, which reduced their population to half its original size, not one among the imperialists even as much as seemed to notice it, least of all Dag Hammarskjöld. But now that the Belgian imperialists have lined up a few of the Baluba leaders and are using some of their supporters against the Congolese liberation movement, the UN Secretary General has suddenly donned the uniform of a Baluba battle chieftain and raised the slogan of genocide as his battle cry! A more disgusting example of hypocrisy could scarcely be conceived!
Probably not more than one out of a thousand people in this country will remember that the UN Security Council passed a resolution last April which called upon the “Government of the Union of South Africa to initiate measures bringing about racial harmony based on equality.”
What fine humanitarian sentiment! It is to be noted that the resolution did not merely call for the abolition of the hated pass system, for the abolition of discriminatory legal penalties – such as the monstrous practice of whipping African prisoners. It called for equality. Equality! In the Union of South Africa, no less! In apartheid-ridden South Africa! Headlines to this effect were splashed practically throughout the globe, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Only a bare five months have elapsed since the Security Council passed the South African resolution, and yet it seems to have been completely obliterated from the memory of mankind. But is it the short memory of the people which is to blame or is it the long repressive arm of the imperialist oppressors and their kept press which is to blame?
At the height of the momentous rising of the South African masses in their first great bid for liberation, the UN launched “Operation Global Deception.” But no sooner had the rising been drowned in blood than the UN went into an entirely different operation. In this one it has carefully maintained a virtual conspiracy of silence and his to date refrained from so much as printing a two inch item to remind the world of the resolution which it so ostentatiously displayed when the million-fold South African masses were on the march.
It is extremely instructive to note, particularly in relation to the UN’s tactic in the Congo, that the South African resolution ordered – yes, ordered – the “Secretary General (Dag Hammarskjöld) in consultation with the Government of the Union of South Africa, to make such arrangements as would adequately help in upholding the purposes and principles of the Charter (of the UN) and to report to the Security Council whenever necessary and appropriate.”
Virtually the same concluding paragraph as in the Congo resolution! With this difference, however, that the South African resolution was conveniently put away in the UN cabinet marked “Fil and Forget” while the Congo resolution was executed in accordance with the wishes and plans of the imperialists. This was done with the knowledge of those who knew better (Khrushchev!), and with the acquiescence of those who should have known better (Lumumba, Bourguiba, Nkrumah, et al!).
In the Congo, imperialist mouthpiece Hammarskjold finds the isolated skirmish of the Congolese liberation army against the Balubas “actions that cannot be viewed merely as examples of internal political conflict, they had the characteristics of the crime of genocide.” Are these characteristics absent to the Secretary General in the case of South Africa?
When the French imperialists launch a six-year war of extermination against the Algerian people, is that not genocide? But according to Hammarskjöld, that doesn’t go beyond an “internal political conflict” – it’s a “purely domestic affair.”
In the Congo, the UN finds “two opposing forces in conflict” which obliges it to “safeguard law and order.” It did not find “two opposing forces” in the Union of South Africa, lets us say, between the Verwoerd regime and the Pan-Africanist Congress.
The lesson, however, of the sharp contrast between the UN’s position in Leopoldville as compared with Johannesburg must not be lost upon the struggling people of the world. For this more than anything else exposes the true character of the UN as a façade behind which the imperialist countries operate most effectively to suppress the revolutionary peoples and strangle any insurrectionary movement which seeks to free itself of the incubus of monopoly capital.
If half a century ago Lenin could say with justification that no government in modern times can act without taking into calculation the role of the people, today it is a hundred times more true. As the ruling classes become more and more isolated, they are in ever greater need to give the appearance of ruling with the consent of the masses.
More than ever, their most urgent task is to have a world body which has the outward appearance of legal authority flowing from the peoples of the world.
The UN fulfills that function. That is why the leading imperialist governments took the initiative in forming it. In the more than fifteen years of its existence, a period which has been so rich in the development of so many revolutionary uprisings of the oppressed peoples, the UN has not been found in a single instance on the side of the oppressed.
Perhaps the very worst aspect of the coming UN Assembly meeting is that it takes place amidst the growing attempt of world imperialism to isolate China, to disrupt China’s relations with its neighbors in Asia, and to find a medium by which to obtain the acquiescence of Khrushchev and his colleagues to attain these objectives.
The very appearance of Khrushchev at any world meeting without the presence of China is in itself the most damning indictment of Khrushchev’s policy, and an unmitigated affront to a workers’ state representing well-nigh a quarter of the human race.
Last updated: 11 May 2026