'May I speak a word or two against brotherhood?'.

Ralph Bunche was present at the creation of the United Nations as a member of the United States State Department group that began the drafting of the UN Charter under the direction of Leo Pasvolsky. At the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, he was the principal drafter of Chapters XI (Declaration regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories) and XII (International Trusteeship System). Bunche came to the UN Secretariat as an expert on colonialism--and on the decolonization that was soon to come and trusteeship.

His first task at the United Nations was to set up the Trusteeship Department. Palestine was a League of Nations mandate and could, theoretically, have become a Trust Territory. In 1947, Secretary-General Trygve Lie sent Bunche as his personal representative with the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP). Finding the members of UNSCOP "just about the worst group I have ever had to work with", he finally wrote both the majority (partition) and the minority reports (federation)--"a ghost-writing harlot", he noted.

The Partition Plan was adopted by the General Assembly in November 1947. Ralph Bunche believed he had seen the last of the Palestine problem, but in May 1948 the British left Palestine, the State of Israel was declared, and five Arab armies invaded the new Jewish State. The Security Council called for a truce and appointed a mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, and Trygve Lie sent Bunche to help him. To pin down an uneasy truce, Bunche set up the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), which is still in existence, and in doing so formulated the basic principles of what later became peacekeeping. He was the inseparable companion and adviser of the Mediator, but on 17 September 1948 a series of delays and aircraft breakdowns prevented him from joining Count Bernadotte in Jerusalem to inspect the future United Nations headquarters--Government House.

Count Bernadotte and the French observer who took Bunche's place were assassinated on their way back from Government House by the extremist Stern Gang. Bunche succeeded as Mediator and on the island of Rhodes negotiated armistice agreements between Israel and its four Arab neighbours, a feat that was widely regarded as impossible and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Characteristically, Bunche was inclined to turn down the Prize on the grounds that he had simply been doing his job, but Trygve Lie instructed him to accept it for the good of the Organization.

Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold made Bunche Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs; his new responsibilities included critical negotiating and mediating assignments, as well as the organization and direction of peacekeeping operations.

During the Suez crisis in 1956, the first UN peacekeeping force--UN Emergency Force in the Middle East (UNEF I)--arrived in the Suez Canal area one week after the General Assembly's decision to establish it.

When asked if this extraordinary haste was due to the fear of Soviet "volunteers" arriving in the area, Bunche replied: "We wanted to demonstrate that the United Nations resolution was not an empty gesture and to avoid the development of a vacuum in the area ... We had a resolution, but I think not many people thought that very much could be done quickly about it."

With the same driving sense of urgency, Bunche organized the observer group--UNOGIL--during the very dangerous crisis in Lebanon in 1958 and the peacekeeping force in Cyprus--UNFICYP--in 1964. He personally directed the large and complex operation in the Congo--ONUC--in 1960, for which 3,000 UN troops arrived in the country within four days of the Security Council decision to establish the force.

Bunche called Dag Hammarskjold "the most remarkable man I have ever seen or worked with", and they became a strong working team. The Secretary-General's death in Africa on 17 September 1961--the same date on which Count Bernadotte had been assassinated 13 years before--was a crushing blow to Bunche, who on both occasions took the lead in rallying a shocked and disconsolate UN Secretariat to get on with the job.

Bunche was the main support of Hammarskjold's successor, U Thant and, much against his will, renounced his intention to leave the United Nations and go back to work on civil rights because U Thant refused to accept his resignation.

I have mentioned a few highlights of Ralph Bunche's UN career. His modesty was such that his UN colleagues knew little or nothing of his earlier achievements.

Born in Detroit, where his father was an itinerant barber, Bunche was orphaned at eleven and brought up by a formidable grandmother in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Success at school, both as student and athlete, took him to the University of California in Los Angeles and as a graduate student to Harvard University. Colonialism was the subject of his prize-winning doctoral thesis, and he did field work in Cameroon, French Togo, South Africa, Kenya and the Congo. His writings on the race problem in the United States were an important prelude to the civil rights movement. In A World View of Race (1936), he made an original analysis of the parallels between the race problem in the United States and the global phenomenon of colonialism. Bunche set up the Political Science Department at Howard University, where he was an influential professor and teacher. He was Gunnar Myrdal's chief assistant and researcher in producing the classic "An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy", writing four of the lengthy monographs on which the book was based. During the Second World War, as America's foremost expert on the colonial world, he worked in the United States Office of Strategic Services until he moved in 1944 to the State Department, where he was the first black official.

Bunche brought to his work at the United Nations the vitality, integrity and spirit of a remarkable family, the intellect of a scholar, the analytical mind and the experience of a political scientist who had worked mostly in the field, and the passion for justice and freedom of a member of an oppressed minority Throughout his years of success and public acclaim, he remained, as he had always been, down-to-earth, humorous, kind and unpretentious. As I said at his funeral: "The grander he got, the nicer and more relaxed he became."

Bunche was more concerned with achieving results than with getting the credit for them, more interested in people than in celebrities, and more moved by the struggles of the young, the oppressed and the disadvantaged than by the caprices and favours of the powerful and the famous. He was intensely proud of being both American and black, but was strongly critical of America's failures, especially in regard to his own people. He was convinced that full integration into the American society was the only valid objective indeed the only realistic option--for African Americans.

Bunche never wavered in his conviction that the United Nations must, and could, be made to work. He probably did more than anyone to give substance to this conviction. He detested bigotry and injustice. He believed passionately in the independence of the Secretariat, and strongly resisted improper pressure from Governments, especially his own. By nature a kindly man, he was ruthless with any hint of dishonesty, impropriety or disloyalty to the United Nations. He was intolerant of sloppy or superficial work. His powerful analytical mind worked through and ahead of problems, and he instantly saw through ingenious but unsound notions, slick ideas or devious manoeuvres.

Bunche was a supremely responsible man. Regardless of fatigue or inconvenience, he never gave up on a problem until he was convinced that he had made every possible effort to resolve it. He was usually the first to arrive and the last to leave, and he insisted on being awakened for emergency night calls. He accepted physical risk as a matter of course. In the field, his courage and determination were an inspiration. He greatly enjoyed, but only in the privacy of his own office, the not infrequent comic or farcical aspects of the situations and the people he dealt with.

Bunche disliked sanctimonious or misleading approaches to life's problems. "May I speak a word or two against brotherhood?", he said in one of his last interviews. "Brotherhood is a misused, misleading term. We can save the world with a lot less.... What we need in this world is not brotherhood but coexistence. We need acceptance of the right of every person to his own dignity. We need mutual respect." He liked his fellow human beings. He believed in them and devoted his life to helping them to resolve their conflicts and their difficulties. When he died in 1971, Secretary-General U Thant hailed him as "an international institution in his own right". The General Assembly stood for a minute of silence in his honour.

Ralph Johnson Bunche (1903-1971)

The 7th of August 2003 marked the centenary of the birth of Ralph Johnson Bunche, the first United Nations recipient of the Nobel Peace Price and an Individual who was, as Brian Urquhart recalls in his tribute, "present at the Creation" of the Organization and who at the time of his death in 1971 was Hailed as "an international institution in his own right" (for a fuller profile, Please see page 37 in our Nobel Peace Prize section). Recalling memories of His father in this issue, Ralph Bunche Jr. cites his "strong belief in the strength of United Nations peacekeeping force in the fifties when the political realities were quite different from those of today". And David K. J Jeffrey Notes in his article that "with different opportunities beckoning, he expressly Chose the path of an international civil servant". Ralph Bunche himself, in his Nobel Lecture (see our Essay) enlarged the definition of that term by observing That "the United Nations has no vested interest in the statusquo". Indeed, as Sir Brian (pictured left with Ralph Bunche) affirms, he "never wavered in his Conviction that the United Nations must, and could, be made work".

Brian Urquhart joined the United Nations Secretariat in 1945 after six years in the British army. He worked closely with the first five Secretaries-General, and with Ralph Bunche, on peace and security matters, and especially peacekeeping. He succeeded Ralph Bunche as Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs in 1972 and retired from the United Nations in 1986. From 1986 to 1996, he was Scholar-in-Residence in the international affairs programme at the Ford Foundation. His books include Hammarskjold, a biography of the second Secretary-General; Ralph Bunche: an American Odyssey; and a memoir, A Life in Peace and War.