For this week's meeting, we joined in the annual luncheon of all Charlotte area Rotary Clubs. The place was the Adams Mark Hotel. The time was noon. President Worth Williamson was among the heads of clubs introduced. Immediate Past President Ronnie Pruett presided, as current President of the Charlotte Rotary Council. Past President Ken Harris was thanked for heading the group that found corporate and other sponsors to help defray costs. Other members of our club were well distributed among the approximately 700 Rotarians and guests in attendance.
     The invited speaker for the day was Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He stands, in this position, in a line of such distinguished Americans as Adlai Stevenson, George Bush, Andrew Young, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and our current Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
     On hand to introduce our speaker was North Carolina's senior U. S. Senator, Jesse Helms, who had been with Mr. Holbrooke at the Helms Center in Wingate the day before. Holbrooke, for his part, had invited and introduced Helms in January for the senator's widely-reported address to the United Nations. Holbrooke was President of the U. N. Security Council that month (a rotation position), during which he also arranged major appearances before that body by Secretary Albright and Vice President Gore.
     His remarks to us were made against the background of extensive experience on the international scene. Holbrooke began his diplomatic career in 1962, fresh out of Brown University. During the '60s his work was heavily involved with the Vietnam situation, from AID work, to the White House, to the Paris Peace Talks. In the '70s, under President Carter, he was Assistant Secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. His breadth of expertise is clearly shown by the fact that, two decades later, he held the same high State Department rank, but this time for European and Canadian Affairs, after a term as U. S. Ambassador to Germany, 1993-94.
     We saw or heard of Ambassador Holbrooke almost daily in the media while he worked to negotiate peace in the troubled Balkans. He brokered the Dayton Accords to end the war in Bosnia, and worked similarly to end conflict in Kosovo. His appointment to his current post as our nation's representative to the U. N. occurred in August of last year. His almost forty-year career was not spent wholly in government, but included several periods in the private sector, on its for-profit and its not-for-profit sides.
     His remarks to Mecklenburg County's Rotarians centered on the relationships between the U. S. and the U. N., their ups and downs, and especially their move into calmer waters, thanks to an unexpected alliance of himself and Senator Helms in behalf of bi-partisanship in recent days. He gave some of the credit for this development to Charlotte's own Ike Belk, on the dais to introduce Jesse Helms. Ike's recent role as a member of the U. S. Public Delegation to the 54th General Assembly of the U. N. brought him in contact with Holbrooke, and helped facilitate a warmer-than-might-have-been-expected communication between this key member of the Democratic administration's Holbrooke and the Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Helms' historic talk to the Security Council, and the unprecedented responses by all foreign governments' ambassadors, seem to have opened a door for dialogue, which holds rich promise for much better relationships between our nation and the world body, Holbrooke said.
     Policy-wise, the U. N. "is not the center of U. S. foreign policy," he went on, but "it is an indispensable part of it." The U. N. also has an interesting position as being a body to which not only governments relate, but also NGOs (non-governmental organizations), of which Rotary International is one of the more important. Earlier in the program, we heard from RI's representative at the U. N. complex in New York, Donald W. Treimann, who introduced us to some of the important collaborations between RI and the U. N., especially in aid and health matters in the Third World.
     Thanks to an agreement crafted by Senators Helms and Biden, $926 million of the amounts by which the U. S. was said to be in arrears in its U. N. dues was approved for payment by the Congress, to be delivered when certain "benchmarks" were met by the U. N. The last of these is a lowering of the percentage of expenses covered by the U. S. Even when the U. S. was in arrears, it was still the largest contributor, Holbrooke said, in answer to a question. He did not believe our assessment had been excessive, however, given our nation's economic strength. Whether the organization is strong enough to manage the far-flung and complex peace-keeping roles it has accepted is a reason for worry. Some of the international and intranational situations it tackles give an intractable impression.
     The Ambassador took several questions from the gathered Rotarians. Topics included: The Iranian elections (It seems the younger citizens there want to join the world.) Serbian reconstruction (As long as their leadership seems to foment terrorist acts against peacekeepers, there is no chance of U. S. help with such.) U. S. forgiveness of Russian debt (Policy toward Russia is complex and has been hard to plan over the past several years.) Turkey-Greece relationships (Better now than in the past—a temporary era of good feeling.) Strengthening the Organization of African Unity (The U. N. has strong hopes that regional bodies like the OAU can take in hand the problems of their continents.) The aging U.N. buildings in New York (Being owned by an international group, they are exempt from U. S. and N. Y. building standards, such as asbestos, but needed repair will, for such reasons, cost a staggering amount--$800 million, if it can be found.
     For Holbrooke's more detailed February 7 speech on more or less the same topic, please see his office's website www.un.int/usa/00_018.htm
     His biography can be accessed through this Rotary website, or www.un.int/usa/holb_bio.htm

Click here for full text of Richard Holbrooke's speech of February 22

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