Secretariat

Extract

Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, in the introduction1 to his fifteenth annual report on the work of the UN, June 16, 1959, to June 15, 1960, observed that the year had been characterized by 1) the development into independence of a number of African states, and 2) the importance of this development for the international community, (a) in the new UN membership of these states, and (b) in developments in the Republic of the Congo, which had provided the UN with the greatest single task thus far confronting it. These developments, he continued, had created for the Organization a responsibility to further and support the independence of the new nations, and were a test both of its parliamentary institutions and of the efficiency and strength of its executive. Negative aspects of these developments were an intense anti-colonialism, which had overflowed in a strong resistance to any suspected attempt of interference from outside and in elements of racism, and, in the parliamentary sphere, the new problem of longer debates and more cumbersome proceedings, although it was the conviction of the Secretary-General that the addition of new members to the UN would result in increased democratization of proceedings by lessening the influence of firm groupings with firm engagements