Year Zero (43 page)

Other films in the American cinemas that spring, no doubt aimed at lifting the flagging war spirit in the last months of the Pacific War, were John Wayne's
Back to Bataan
, and
Objective, Burma!
with Errol Flynn. But there was more cheerful entertainment on hand as well, including MGM's
Son of Lassie
, Dorothy Lamour in
Medal for Benny
, and
Here Come the Co-Eds
with Abbott and Costello.

Accommodations, for which delegates were supposed to pay themselves, were certainly more plush than at Yalta. Gladwyn Jebb, who had attended most wartime conferences, including Yalta, as Churchill's diplomatic adviser, described the San Francisco experience as “an appalling
outbreak of hospitality.”
²¹
The Big Four Powers (soon to be Five), presided over by U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., met in the circular library of a penthouse apartment at the top of the Fairmont Hotel—“with a blue ceiling and two love seats upholstered in green,” in the words of
Time
magazine.
²²
The lesser delegations worked on the floors below.

Agreement on general principles came swiftly between the Big Powers. But there were tensions between them and the rest, between the aim of Big Power dominance and a democratic world organization. The smaller countries, represented by the grandiloquent Australian foreign minister, Dr. Herbert Evatt, resented the veto rights of the Big Powers in the Security Council, but they had to give way. The Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, took the most extreme Big Power position. He continued to insist on the right to veto any subject the Soviet Union did not wish to be discussed in the UN. This attitude almost sank the conference, until a U.S. diplomatic mission was sent to Moscow, and Stalin instructed Molotov to back down.

All appeared to be fine, among the Big Three at least, when Molotov organized a lavish banquet for his British and U.S. counterparts, the suave Anthony Eden, and Edward Stettinius, described by Brian Urquhart as “a man with theatrical good looks and unnaturally white teeth.”
²³
As usual at these Russian affairs, huge amounts of food and drink were consumed. Photographs were taken of the three men toasting one another, in which even the colorless Molotov, known in Soviet Party circles as “Steely Ass” for the long hours spent at his desk, managed to contrive an air of bonhomie. It was getting late. The gentlemen were beginning to feel distinctly woozy.

Then something extraordinary happened. Still in an expansive mood of chummy goodwill, Molotov announced to his esteemed colleagues that he could finally divulge what had happened to the sixteen leaders from the Polish underground. They had been arrested for “diversionist activity” against the Soviet Red Army, a crime that carried the death penalty. Eden, first shocked, then furious, demanded a full explanation. Molotov, ruffled by Eden's sharp tone, became sullen and defensive. The festive mood instantly evaporated. Once more, the conference was in danger.

This storm, too, blew over, however. Wishful thinking kept reality at bay. American liberals were told by the
Nation
magazine that once “truly free elections” were held in Poland, “Russia's moral position” would be “greatly strengthened” and “distrust reduced to a minimum.”
²⁴
The vague promise of free elections was the fig leaf, eagerly grasped at by the Western Allies at Yalta, which no one yet wished to throw away. Only the Soviets knew that the sixteen brave Poles who had risked everything by resisting the Germans in the most ghastly conditions had already been tortured by the Soviet secret police and tried as “Nazi collaborators.” They were sentenced on June 21, while the San Francisco conference was still going on. All but two were later murdered in Soviet prisons.

Even as the sixteen Poles were being tortured in Moscow, the Big Powers discussed a declaration on human rights for inclusion in the preamble to the Charter (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came later, in 1948). This noble fruit of Enlightenment thinking, as well as Christian universalism, the idea that human rights should benefit not just one community, defined by faith or culture or political borders, but mankind, was seen by Stéphane Hessel and many others as the greatest contribution of the postwar order. Universal human rights were linked to the law, adopted in Nuremberg, on “crimes against humanity,” which in turn was linked to the concept of genocide, defined in 1944 by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.”

Not that anyone suggested for a minute that human rights would or could be enforced. Quite to the contrary. In the words of a British foreign policy adviser at San Francisco, the historian C. K. Webster, “Our policy is to avoid ‘
guarantee
of human rights,' though we might not object to a declaration.”
²⁵
And a declaration duly arrived, based on a draft written by General Jan Smuts, the South African statesman and hero of the Boer War, who had assisted at the birth of the League of Nations, as well as of the UN. These were the words decided upon in San Francisco by the Big Powers in June: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined . . . to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of
the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small . . .”

Michael Foot, in his column for the
Daily Herald
, singled out the moral leadership of the Soviet Union for special praise. He pointed out that before the war the British government under Neville Chamberlain had suppressed the news of Nazi atrocities. But then, of course, “the victims were only Liberals, Socialists, Pacifists and Jews.” Nowadays, he observed with a touch of superciliousness, “these types will have the advantage of their rights being included in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Freedoms drawn up by General Smuts. This Charter will even apply to black people in South Africa. Or will it?” Foot's doubts on this score were not unfounded, but he, too, was happy to overlook the foul stench of the Polish question. Indeed, he commended the Soviets for expressing “a far more logical and unequivocal view” on “the political rights of dependent peoples than any other nation.”

There was one more crisis before the Conference reached its conclusion at the end of June. The action, this time, was in the Levant, where on May 29 French troops were fighting Syrians in the streets of Damascus, and dropping bombs, not just on the ancient capital, but on Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. The French had called for reinforcements after Syrian demands that they transfer special Syrian forces under French command to the Syrian national army.

The next day, Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli, a deft diplomatic operator, wrote a letter to President Truman expressing the same sentiments as Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno, though with a much more successful outcome. Here were the French, he wrote in perfectly justified indignation, killing Syrians with weapons bought with money borrowed from the United States to fight the Germans. The United States had recognized Syria as an independent country in 1944. So: “Where now is the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms? What can we think of San Francisco?”
²⁶

The Americans needed little encouragement to take the side of the Syrians. European imperialism was not popular in Washington, and
French imperialism least of all. Unlike Indochina, which was rather more alien territory to the Americans in those days, Syria and Lebanon had long been regarded with the kind of benevolent paternalism bestowed on the Chinese as well, a mixture of missionary zeal and commercial interest: the American University in Beirut, Christian missions in Jerusalem, an Open Door economic policy. The popular phrase among U.S. policymakers at the time was “moral leadership.” No doubt, as appears to be true of John Foster Dulles, the moral sentiment was sincere, but so was the ambition to lead.

Since the Allies had already promised to recognize postwar Syrian independence when British troops occupied the Levant in 1941, they could hardly ignore Quwatli's plea now. So Churchill instructed his man on the spot, General Bernard Paget, to drive the French back into their barracks. This was not a difficult task, as the French were far too few in number to resist. The left-leaning
Manchester Guardian
reported the event with patriotic delight. Its reporter “marched into Damascus with the sailors . . . while crowds of surprised Damascenes clapped their hands . . . The people of Damascus hissed and booed the long line of lorries, tanks, and Bren-gun carriers taking French troops out of the city, escorted by British armored cars . . .”
²⁷

General de Gaulle responded with fury to what he saw as a heinous Anglo-Saxon conspiracy: “We are not in a position to open hostilities against you at the present time. But you have insulted France and betrayed the West. This cannot be forgotten.”
²⁸

On the surface, the Syrian crisis was the perfect test for the new world order that was being shaped in San Francisco. If ever there was a legitimate case for living up to the words of the Atlantic Charter and the ethos of the UN, this was it. The French, despite promises made in 1941, were trying to restore their colonial authority. The British were quite right to put them in their place, hence the proud tone of the
Guardian
's report.

It wasn't, of course, quite as simple as that. As they had elsewhere in the Middle East, the British played a double game, making different
promises to different people. With the end of the Ottoman Empire in sight in 1916, Britain and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement had carved up the Levant into spheres of interest: France would have the run of Syria and Lebanon while Britain took charge of Transjordan and Iraq. In 1941, a year after France had been defeated by Germany, British forces moved into Damascus, promising to support Syrian independence while recognizing France's privileged position. These were obviously not compatible aims. In fact, what the British really wanted was to become the major players in the Levant themselves. So they were quite happy to see the Syrians provoke the French. Violent French retaliation was just the excuse needed to kick them out altogether. And this, in effect, is what was happening in the early summer of 1945.

There was something quaintly old-fashioned, indeed redolent of late-nineteenth-century imperial skirmishes, about the Syrian crisis. In any event, though this was not yet clear in San Francisco, Britain and France would both lose their preeminent positions in the Middle East. The United States and the Soviet Union would soon call the shots. One British wartime plan offered a glimpse of the not too distant future. It was hoped in London that Britain and the U.S. would jointly police the postwar world by establishing military bases under the auspices of the UN; the U.S. in Asia, and the British in the Middle East. The Americans had already made it clear that local sovereignty would not stretch to areas selected for U.S. military installations—the so-called strategic trust territories. Already in the first months after the war, the dim shape of a more informal empire was starting to be visible. What the British had not quite realized was how minor their role in this new world was destined to be.

The Syrians were not alone in demanding independence. Indeed this was one of the talking points of San Francisco. And Michael Foot was not wrong to say that the Soviet Union, for its own not strictly philosophical reasons, was more supportive of such aspirations than its western European allies. But, although the General Assembly would, in time, become a vital forum for anticolonial agitation, decolonization was not yet on the agenda in 1945. The most that colonial powers would concede was the
promise, enshrined in the UN Charter, to look after “the well-being” of the inhabitants of the “non-self-governing territories.” Self-government would be promoted “according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their various stages of advancement.” The former governor of the Punjab, Baron (William Malcolm) Hailey of Shahpur and Newport Pagnell, could reassure the readers of the London
Times
that there was “nothing here which is not already implicit in our own policy.” And, more important, there was “clearly no intention that the United Nations Organization should intervene in the application of the principles of the charter by the colonial powers concerned.”
²⁹
All that Britain, France, and other imperial powers were obliged to do was to report regularly to the Secretary General of the UN on conditions in the “territories” they continued to possess.

•   •   •

GIVEN THE HIGH EXPECTATIONS
in some quarters for a world government, the final outcome of the San Francisco conference was bound to disappoint. For a world government to work, national governments would have had to give up their sovereign rights. Of the Big Powers, only China, represented by T. V. Soong, business tycoon and politician, talked about “yielding if necessary a part of our sovereignty.”
³⁰
China had even been prepared to give up on Big Power veto rights. But since Chiang Kai-shek's sovereignty in China itself was already looking shaky, Chinese magnanimity in this matter did not cut much ice.

In his dispatches for the
New Yorker
, E. B. White had put his finger on the main paradox of the conference. He wrote that “the first stirrings of internationalism seem to tend toward, rather than away from, nationalism.”
³¹
He saw in the national flags, the uniforms, the martial music, the secret meetings, the diplomatic moves, “a denial of the world community.” Under all the fine internationalist rhetoric, he heard “the steady throbbing of the engines: sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.”

Another observer in San Francisco was John F. Kennedy, recently discharged from the U.S. Navy. He agreed with the “world federalists” that
“world organization with common obedience to law would be the solution.” But he realized that nothing would ever come of this unless the common feeling that war was the “ultimate evil” were strong enough to drive governments together. An unlikely event, in his view.
³²