To travel hopefully ...

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Mr Jeremy Shearar, DDG

Meintjeskop Courier Volume 3, 1993

During the mid-fifties, the Meintjeskop Courier was a dry as dust newsletter, of which I was for a while editor, or more accurately, proofreader. Presumably, the International Organisations Division was used to time on its hands. Even then we felt the need for some leavening and solicited articles and humorous contributions. This discreet foray into embryonic literacy was abruptly halted by Mr D D Forsyth when he put his stamp of disapproval on a "Post Report on Pretoria", drawn up by John Mills and John Selfe. A sense of humour it seemed was the prerogative only of the more junior personnel.

One year-round psychosomatic illness it mentioned, which varied only in acuteness, although it was diagnosed simultaneously with the founding of the Department, was "postitis". The symptoms do not need repetition but they "grew in intensity each year". Prognosis was never good and suggested treatment was "resignation".

With the changes both recent and imminent within the Department and the country, perhaps this is an opportunity for some of the Courier's readers to prepare an updated Post Report for our overseas colleagues who may have forgotten what Pretoria is like and also to prepare the new intake, many of whom may have grown up abroad, for cultural shock.    

              

Changes there have certainly been and the multi-lateral division has been a good barometer. It was possible in that post report to describe one of the Department's occupational diseases as "directivitis", which was the state of hypertension the I0S suffered, with some side effects felt by other desks, in preparing briefs for international conferences, especially the UN General Assembly and the annual meetings of the Specialized Agencies. 

For nearly two decades this particular disease has been dormant with only sporadic, minor outbreaks, but like others which mankind felt it had conquered, "directivitis" is showing signs of incipient revival and should, by next year, have spread its viruses throughout the Department.

In those early days I0S consisted of a First Secretary (shared with the Political Desk), a Second Secretary, a Third Secretary and two Cadets. One only expected to become a First Secretary in one's later thirties. Perhaps I ought to stop here, or readers might be overwhelmed by such nostalgia as waiting anything between two weeks and five years.

Although we had no formal problems in our institutional relations in those days and the small band of multilateralists were kept very busy, signs of darker days were on the horizon. Our unwillingness to join the UN resolution on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our failure to contribute to global contributions to alleviate the plight of developing nations on the grounds that charity began at home, our divorce from UNESCO for incompatibility, added to the development of our domestic policy and the start of the decolonization of Africa, were all signs of a developing rift. So much so that our directives had already assumed the defensive tone they would retain until the need to produce them had disappeared.

The emphasis on our relations with the UN shifted to the Special Political Section which was mainly responsible for Apartheid and South West Africa (Trusteeship) issues and, when we down-graded the status of our New York Mission for a couple of years, a mistake we did not fortunately repeat when the provocation was greater, I0S developed more or less a holding role. This did not affect our relations with the Specialized Agencies until 1963 when we left the International Labour Organization after it adopted the Declaration against Apartheid and 1974 when our suspension from the UN General Assembly, led to virtual ostracism by the UN family of organizations.

My Head Office task in those lean days had been to work in the Consular Division (now taken over by Administration but then fascinating as virtually every political or press visa application could cause an international crisis) and to found the Rest of Africa.

The division dealt with all countries other than those which, with the exception of Tanzania, are today members of SADC. We were one Counsellor, a Second Secretary and two Cadets to deal with over forty countries.

We worked hard in the years of dialogue and outward policy and later in the eighties to fend off, without much conviction the total onslaught and the "low intensity war" we believed we were fighting against the UN. Not with total conviction, not with unbounded optimism but, as in the past and I imagine in the future, with dedication.

I0S hung on only by a thread. The few conferences we could attend seemed be distinctly maritime: Whales, Fisheries, Tuna, 'Antarctica, had largely been swallowed in the drift nets of the Legal Division. We were left with such excitements as scratching at the surface of GATT, arguing with the EC over apples and high tensile steels (rather than pears), finding out who were held without trial or had been sentenced to death and preparing defiant speeches for Kurt von Schirnding at the Security Council. Meetings of the Tak Nasionale Vertolking or the total onslaught committees were a relief.

Today, I look at the expanded Multilateral Branch with the eye of a watchful and avuncular obstetrician. I can't help thinking that Moses and I shared forty years, admittedly in rather different wildernesses. He gazed at Canaan from the mountain- tops of Moab and was allowed to go no further. Was Joshua much better off I sometimes wonder? Honey is sticky and milk curdles pretty quickly.