(4 of 5)
A. Yes. It never occurred to me for a single minute that a man in that position would not tell the truth to one of his closest colleagues, particularly someone who was going to defend him. And I deeply resent the idea that I was actually perpetrating a falsehood unknowingly for all that time.
Q. Many Americans came to feel the U.N. had become a forum for Third World radicalism and anti-American actions. How did you see it?
A. I can very well understand American disillusionment and irritation. One must also remember that it was the U.S. that pioneered decolonization, which gave birth to the Third World. There was a kind of adolescent period, I think, in the newly independent developing world where people became, as adolescents often do, extremely radical. The typical example of this trend, the assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism, was a totally counterproductive move.
Q. You worked with Javier Perez de Cuellar.
A. I was delighted when he became Secretary-General. He is a very well- qualified person and extremely intelligent man, who knew the job very well, a very quiet extremely self-effacing man. He spent the sort of wilderness years from 1982 to 1987, pretty bad years in the U.N., as the only negotiator on Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, Western Sahara, Cyprus and a lot of other things, and he established a position of great respect with all the different antagonists in all these situations. When the international climate changed and the outburst of common sense began to take place, he was in a position to act very quickly.
Q. In 1978 U.N. peacekeepers started patrolling the border between Lebanon and Israel, but then in 1982 another war broke out.
A. The Israelis wanted to strike a blow at the P.L.O. I spent a great deal of time trying to persuade rather skeptical Israelis, including Ariel Sharon, that they were better off without an invasion.
Q. Did you agree with the idea of sending the multinational force, a non-U.N. group that included U.S. Marines, into Beirut to help patch Lebanon back together again?
A. No, I think it was a vast misreading of what Lebanon is really like. They drifted gradually into a very controversial position as the great supporter of the government of Lebanon. Well, to most people in Lebanon, the government is just another faction, and furthermore not a very powerful faction. Amin Gemayel's authority seemed to stop at the gates of the Baabda palace.
The only conceivable way to force them into a union would be by years of negotiation and evolving a whole series of ties of interest, but nobody's been able to do it, not since the French.
Q. You carried a message from Yasser Arafat to Menachem Begin?
A. That was just before the 1982 invasion. I think Arafat is genuinely convinced that he has to find a means of coexistence with Israel. What Arafat was saying was that he was interested in peace, and that if he was disposed of, it was unlikely that anyone else would come along who was as convinced of this as he was. I don't think any of these messages were new or particularly welcome to Begin.
Q. Is the world becoming a safer place?