UNITED NATIONS: Secretary-General U Thant sought immediate authority today [Sept 19] to send a special envoy on a peace mission to the Middle East.

He also offered six principles on which a lasting settlement of the conflict there might be based, and blamed the UN itself for contributing to the recent war by failing to come to grips with “the deep-seated and angrily festering problems in that area”.

In his annual report to the General Assembly — to which the Middle East question was transferred yesterday as a high priority item — U Thant said: “I am bound to express my fear that, if again no effort is exerted and no progress is made towards removing the root causes of conflict, within a few years at the most there will be inevitably a new eruption of war.

“There is a desperate need for a determined immediate and urgent effort by the United Nations to help bring about the conditions essential to peace in the Middle East. That effort should be constant and unrelenting until those conditions have been achieved.”

Ignoring earlier reported Arab and Israeli objections to the appointment of a Special UN Representative, U Thant said “such an appointee could serve as a much-needed channel of communication, as a reporter and interpreter of events and views for the Secretary-General and as both a sifter and harmoniser of ideas in the area”.

The United States and Britain have both strongly backed such an appointment, holding that one of the obstacles to progress in settling the Middle East crisis is the absence of impartial information.

Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2017