UNITED STATES-U.N.: “Booooo-tros” Vanishes From U.S. Elections

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 1996 (IPS) - When Republican Senator Robert Dole began campaigning for the U.S. presidency a year ago, his aides were certain he had a winning issue in criticising U.S. support for the United Nations under the leadership of the man he called “Booooo-tros Booooo-tros Ghali.”

Now, with Tuesday’s elections approaching, Dole seems to have few winning issues to play at all, and pundits here are claiming he needs a miracle to beat incumbent Bill Clinton.

More importantly, the cries of “Booooo-tros” so widespread on the campaign trail last winter have faded out of earshot this fall. Instead, perhaps to the United Nations’ relief, Dole has reached out for a different set of foreigners as targets.

Democratic financial official John Huang, Indonesia’s Riady family, and a Democratic fundraiser Dole refers to only as “some guy called Gaaaan-dhi,” have replaced Boutros-Ghali as the demons of the U.S. campaign trail.

Boutros-Ghali is also no longer a staple of jokes on late-night U.S. television, after months of having his name parodied repeatedly by NBC host David Letterman (whom the secretary-general in turn ribbed as “David-David Letterman”).

There are other, more comforting signs for the United Nations that its role as a target for political paranoia in the United States is declining.

The Republican convention in San Diego had declared in August that “We oppose the commitment of American troops to U.N. ‘peacekeeping’ operations under foreign commanders and will never compel American servicemen to wear foreign uniforms or insignia.”

The party platform has also insisted on the sovereignty of U.S. parks — which some rightist U.S. militias contend are endangered by such international interference as the granting of special status by UNESCO.

But by last month, Dole’s insistence that U.S. troops should not serve under “the pale blue flag” of the United Nations had died down.

Ultimately, the death of the U.N. campaign issue underscores what U.N. supporters like John Whitehead, chairman of the United Nations Association of the United States, contended all along: in poll after poll, some 70 percent of the U.S. public supports the United Nations.

Outside of the militias, whose importance in an election remains debatable, the U.S. electorate neither perceives of the United Nations as a failure nor worries about peacekeepers or Boutros-Ghali’s leadership.

Whitehead told Newsweek magazine two months ago that he was disappointed that Dole “chooses to attack Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s name, to make fun of it, in a way that is not appropriate for an American leader.”

But making fun of Boutros-Ghali’s name was the main tactic for Dole to press his case that there was something threatening about the United Nations. As one observer put it, if the secretary- general’s name had been “Peter Ghali,” no U.S. politician would have made so many attacks on U.N. leadership.

Name-calling, on the other hand, is a U.S. political tradition. In 1988, supporters of George Bush made fun of his Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis, claiming “Dukakis” was too hard to pronounce.

That doesn’t mean that the United Nations can breathe a sigh of relief that the political silly season is over. Even if Clinton wins next week, the White House remains on record for having opposed a second term in office for Boutros-Ghali and for demanding further U.N. reforms.

White House officials argue that the rebuff to Boutros-Ghali was never an effort to avoid Dole’s attacks. Rather, they say, it is the only way the Clinton administration could convince an anti- U.N. Congress to free up enough funds to pay back the 1.5 billion dollars in dues that Washington owes.