Geneva Profits From Thriving ‘Peace Industry’

Many have profited from war, but only the Swiss have succeeded in turning peace into a thriving industry.

The search for peace attracts world attention only occasionally--moments such as now when men like Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko sit down together.

But it goes on day in and day out, and it generates profits. Here, the casual display of mink and the proliferation of expensive restaurants attest to this, as does the fact that Geneva is one of the few cities in the world where many of the taxis are plush Mercedes Benz 280s.

Geneva is not the capital of Switzerland--Bern is--but there are diplomatic missions here from 116 countries and more than 15,000 individuals, one of the largest diplomatic communities to be found anywhere.

While the Shultz-Gromyko meeting provides an encouraging sign of hope for the world at large, it has additional significance for Geneva. For if Shultz and Gromyko agree to establish a new framework for continuing negotiations, this city of 350,000 nestled in the hills at the edge of Lake Geneva is likely to be host to yet another important international forum.

Geneva has long been identified with international activity. In the 1860s, the International Red Cross and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war were both established here, but it was the arbitration, in 1872, of a dispute stemming from the American Civil War that really launched Geneva’s peace industry.

After deliberations that went on for nearly a year, Britain agreed to pay the United States $15.5 million for damage inflicted on Union shipping by the British-built Confederate frigate Alabama late in the war. The ornately furnished room in the City Hall where the dispute was resolved has been known ever since as the “Alabama Room.”

A few miles away, on a hill above the city, sprawls Geneva’s largest monument to the quest for peace, the Palace of Nations, built between the two world wars as a permanent home for the ill-fated League of Nations. Today, the Palace of Nations complex contains offices for many of the estimated 7,000 U.N. employees here, as well as conference rooms for important continuing negotiations.

It was here that Austria’s neutrality was negotiated in 1955; that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was negotiated in 1970; that diplomatic efforts to end the war in Afghanistan have taken place.

Murals in the palace’s main chamber reflect the inflated hopes of its designers in the late 1920s, among them “The Death of Armed Victory,” “End of Slavery,” “Hope--The End of War.”

Shultz and Gromyko have decided not to use the palace. They have chosen to alternate between their respective diplomatic missions.

The tortuously slow pace of negotiations that have been undertaken here suggest that any U.S.-Soviet nuclear disarmament talks that stem from the Shultz-Gromyko meeting are likely to drag on for years. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty required four years to work out; a ban on biological weapons agreed upon in 1975 took just as long.

The World Conference on Disarmament was established here in 1932, and the biological weapons ban stands as the lone genuine disarmament accord it has ever achieved. Today, the conference has been stalled for more than a decade on the subject of banning chemical weapons.

Delegates to the conference from 40 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, meet every Tuesday and Thursday morning when the conference is in session. The conference is the world’s principal forum for multilateral disarmament negotiations, and it also deals with such important subjects as the prevention of nuclear war and the banning of new weapons of mass destruction, but it produces little in the way of news.

“It has been deadlocked for so many years that no one seems to care anymore,” a news agency reporter assigned to the conference said.

Often, the process of arms negotiations is as tedious for the participants as it is for the observers. The British diplomat Lord Salter recalled in his memoirs the remark of an Italian delegate, who awakened in the middle of a session, noted that a companion had become extremely attentive and exclaimed:

“My dear colleague, you must be suffering from insomnia.”

The prospect of easing tension between Washington and Moscow has brought renewed hope to those involved in the deadlocked Conference on Disarmament. A member of the conference secretariat, who asked not to be identified by name, remarked:

“We don’t work in a vacuum. It’s a highly political process. If things go well (in the Shultz-Gromyko talks), things here could get going again.”

Geneva’s image as a center for diplomacy has attracted about 40 international organizations, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the International Labor Organization and the World Health Organization.