The Security Council continued to grapple today with the question of the United Nations’ role at the Middle East peace conference. With the opening less than a week-away, none of the participating countries has yet received a formal invitation to attend and the status that Secretary General Kurt Waldheim will assume in Geneva has yet to be defined.
The Council was presented with a draft resolution by Yugoslavia, India and six other ” non-aligned” nations today proposing that Waldheim preside over the conference and empowering the Security Council to decide any change in the “scope of UN participation in the conference.” The draft proposes a substantially broader role for the UN than the observer status originally envisioned by the two co-sponsors of the Geneva conference–the U.S. and Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah met today with this month’s President of the Security Council,. China’s Ambassador Huang. Hun, and discussed the non-aligned intention to have the Security Council convene. According to sources, the U.S. and USSR do not favor the non-aligned request to give Waldheim a mandate to the peace conference.
China, according to the sources, is supporting the non-aligned move on the assumption that if the Security Council will be represented in the talks the U.S. and the Soviet Union will not be the controlling force of the conference. Diplomatic sources pointed out that some of the non-aligned members demand that the-UN preside over the talks because Resolution 242 is the basis of the up-coming peace conference.
It appears likely that some action will be taken before the conference begins. Private consultations are being held among Security Council members on the non-aligned proposal. Britain and France reportedly are encouraging moves for broader UN participation; the two superpowers, mainly the U.S., are decidedly cool to any arrangement that might diminish their own roles at Geneva, Israel is known to be opposed to anything more than token UN participation on grounds that the UN is stacked in favor of the Arabs.
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