BARRING any extraordinary last-minute upset, next week South Korea’s Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon will be chosen by the 15-member Security Council as the next, and eighth, UN secretary-general. Although there will once again be discontent among some delegations at what is seen as a top-table stitch up, the full General Assembly of 192 member states will almost certainly endorse Ban.
Outgoing Secretary-General Kofi Annan has described the office as “the world’s most impossible job”. The question now being asked of the little-known Ban is will he succeed where Annan failed while being able to build upon the very real successes achieved by his Ghanian predecessor?
Annan did acquire considerable moral stature in his two-term decade in office. Ban reportedly lacks Annan’s quiet charisma, but, against this, he has a high reputation as a mediator and an efficient administrator. During his campaign for the post, he said the UN should promise less and deliver more. The assessment is partly inaccurate. The UN is frequently trapped by the expectations of the international community rather than any specific promises of its own. Peacekeeping is a classic example where it is frequently expected to provide an immediate Band-Aid for inter-communal wounds that conceal deep social fractures. Nevertheless, with better organization, rigorous accountability and maximum transparency, the monstrous bureaucracies that make up the UN can improve in both efficiency and delivery.
This said, the very politicking that has gone into Ban’s selection pinpoints the fault lines, which have always weakened the UN. The five permanent Security Council members — China, France, Russia, the UK and the US — have all been bargaining with the Ban campaign to hold or secure key roles within the UN Secretariat. This gerrymandering reaches right through the organization with jobs being shared out more on geography than merit.
Reform is therefore not simply a matter of administration. There are root and branch issues that no secretary-general can address without firm backing from the General Assembly and the Security Council.
There are two key international crises facing Annan’s successor — the Middle East and North Korea’s nuclear armaments. On the latter, Ban is extremely well-briefed since as South Korea’s foreign minister, he has been at the forefront of the tortuous negotiations with the North. There will be fears, however, that as UN secretary-general he may be too close to the Korean issue to be effective. With one exception, past holders of the office have come from effectively neutral countries. The exception was Egypt’s Boutros Boutros Ghali who was perceived by Western states, US in particular, as being too close to the Palestinian issue and was driven from office by the Clinton administration because he challenged Washington too many times. It may be a tough call for Ban to head off dangerous saber rattling from South Korea’s military ally but it will be his new duty to try.
