An Unfair Maneuver

The application of the Palestine Liberation Organization for membership in the World Health Organization is a mischievous and unfair maneuver, jeopardizing the organization’s ability to function effectively at a critical moment in world disease control. The application should be vigorously opposed.

The PLO application to WHO is obviously a precursor of bids for full membership in all the organizations that constitute the United Nations. PLO officials have rejected the pleas of Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, WHO director general, to withdraw their application. Given the extensive international support and sympathy that the PLO enjoys among African, Asian and some Latin American member nations, a majority may in fact approve the application.

It would be a dangerous precedent for the United Nations, which is committed by its own title to being an assembly of nation states. It would also prejudge critical elements yet to be negotiated in a Middle East peace agreement, including the status of a Palestinian state. This bid, at this time, even as serious negotiations with the United States are being undertaken with the PLO to accelerate the peace process, raises grave doubts about the PLO’s commitment to peace.

In an effort to keep the PLO out of WHO, Secretary of State James A. Baker III has threatened to withhold the money it is obligated to provide the WHO if it admits the PLO. That would be a most unfortunate outcome, for the United States provides 25% of WHO’s funding, and withdrawal of U.S. funds would imperil the organization’s exceptionally effective role in world public health, even as WHO has been given the added task of coordinating the global effort to control the AIDS pandemic.