The revolution and pacts (59). The dirty border war. ‘A soldier without enemy'. “In the mission to spread liberty and peace to the Middle East, we can take a valuable lesson from Dr. Bunche. Are there dangers? Yes, but that won't stop us. Is it difficult? Very difficult, but that won't deter us. Will we too have to persevere, cajole, shout, and reason with others? You can bet on it. Will we have to balance patience with persistence? No doubt. Will we too succeed? The answer is a resounding yes.” Collin Powell, former US Secretary of State in commemoration of the Centenary of Ralph Bunche, November 10, 2003. After the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, his deputy Ralph Bunche (1904-1971) had been thrust into the role of chief mediator The negotiating problems were very complex and a truce demanded by the UN Security Council had broken down. The first UN Secretary-General, the Norwegian Trygve Lie, had asked Bunche to join the UN. Bunche went into the UN service to work with the question of decolonisation. In 1947, Lie made him assistant to a special committee on Palestine. Despite awareness of the personal danger posed by the role, Bunche did not hesitate to accept Lie's request. Bunche travelled to Paris, where he met with UN representatives to discuss the new borders between Jews and Arabs that he and Bernadotte had proposed. Thus, Bunche's service to the UN was not a planned career move; he was simply ‘borrowed' from the State Department by UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, who placed him in charge of the UN Department of Trusteeship to handle problems of the world's peoples who had not yet achieved self-government. His diplomatic skills became legendary at the UN, and they were put to the ultimate test from 1947 to 1949 when he was given the most important assignment of his career-the confrontation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In the meantime, fighting in Palestine broke out again between Israeli and Egyptian forces. The General Assembly of the UN gave up the Bernadotte Plan and the Security Council in a resolution originally drafted by Bunche, demanded that the parties in the conflict should establish an armistice through negotiations. After weeks of toil, Bunche was able to bring the Israelis and Egyptians to the negotiating table at Rhodes in January 1949. The Arab countries initially refused to negotiate directly with Israel, but on the isle of Rhodes Bunche managed to persuade the Egyptians and Israelis to sit together at the negotiating table, and discuss problems face to face. Through discretion, patience and humour, Bunche won the confidence of the negotiating parties. He formulated compromise proposals and was willing to work for months to come to an agreement. With Bernadotte's fate in mind, Bunche made the negotiators agree to total secrecy; the press and Security Council were only to receive official reports. Hard negotiations led to the signing of a truce by both parties by the end of February 1949. As Egypt was the leading Arab nation, it paved the way for later agreements between Israel and Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Recent research has shown that the UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie and the US government played a much more decisive role in the negotiations than was otherwise known before. On several occasions, Bunche asked President Truman of the US, and Lie for help to prevent a breakdown in the negotiations, and information that was meant solely for the UN was passed on to the US delegation by Secretary Lie. Like most Norwegian Social Democrats, Lie is believed to have sympathised strongly with the Jewish position, and US President Truman supported the Jewish case because his advisers informed him that Jewish votes in the US were both important for his re-election in 1948 and for the Democratic Party in the future. As both Lie and Truman were biased in favour of Israel, pressure to compromise was mainly applied to the Egyptian delegation, and the final agreement was more beneficial to Israel than the Arab countries, despite Bunche's efforts to achieve impartiality. In fact, Bunche's diary shows that he was often annoyed with the behaviour of the Jewish delegates and had sympathy for the demands of the Egyptian delegation. With the conclusion of the agreement between Israel and Syria on July 20, 1949, the Rhodes armistice negotiations were completed Israel was recognised by the world community (excluding the Arab states) as an independent state within new borders, and was admitted as a member of the UN. Personally, Bunche believed that the Palestinian Arabs were the big losers in the conflict, and, in fact, the agreements sealed the fate of the UN plan for an independent Palestinian state. The Israelis kept almost all the land they had conquered. Israel had expanded from the UN-allocated 55% of British ruled Palestine to 79%. Jordan and Egypt took what was left for the Palestinian Arabs. The armistice agreements were intended as the basis for peace negotiations within a year, but these never took place. Although the UN and the US called for the rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, this never happened. The fate of the Palestinian refugees remained an unsolved problem. 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