U.N. Corruption Alleged

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31206, 2 November 1966, Page 17

U.N. Corruption Alleged

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) STOCKHOLM, Nov. 1. A Swedish former commander of the United Nations peacekeeping forces has published a sweeping indictment of the world body, charging that it was riddled with espionage and corruption.

Major-General Carl Von Horn, who commanded United States troops in the Congo, Palestine, and the Yemen, said in his 400-page memoirs, “Soldiers of Peace,” that the United Nations Administrative Department had “foggy ideas about reality.” He said the department was “filled with a passion for formalism and manned by people who became a swarm of angry bees when their hive was threatened by criticism.” He claimed some United Nations employees “clearly had taken the job mainly to make money in suspicious ways: smuggling, black market deals, espionage, and corruption.” Confused Muddle General Von Horn said the Congo operation was a confused muddle and completely amateurish right from the beginning. In Jerusalem, attractive Israeli girls were freed from military service for special tasks—to entertain guests from the United Nations, he alleged. “But the enlistment for Israel’s cause which took place between the sheets

came second to systematic, organised corruption,” the general said. General Von Horn said he resigned from his last post as head of the United Nations observer group in the Yemen after only two months, because the “whole situation was a farce.”

After asking for more men, he was told to “stop complaining and get on with your work.” When the SecretaryGeneral, U Thant, said his comments were entirely unjustified, he resigned. “This admonitory message from U Thant was the last straw, I tendered my resignation, a resignation which I was asked to motivate so that no undesirable publicity would result,” he said. Describing a visit to the United Nations in New York in 1963, General Von Horn said: “The new member states revelled in the politic-ally-inspired generosity of the big powers and had already discovered it paid off to act noisily, contemptuously and insolently. “Everywhere there were

small groups of eager Africans engrossed in animated discussion, the conspiracy effect of which disappeared when a white girl joined them.” General Von Horn accused the Administrative Department of constantly refusing to follow advice and alleged that a report to former Sec-retary-General, Dag Hammarskjoeld, on his (Horn’s) experiences in the Congo “somehow disappeared.”

He said the administrative Department blocked his efforts to get rid of civilian employees active in smuggling, the black market, espionage, or corruption because it abhorred “having to agree that such things existed.”