UN mess is Ban Ki-moon's
challenge By Alexander Casella
When Ban Ki-moon assumes his position of
United Nations secretary general on January 1 -
barring an unforeseen last-minute hitch - he will
take over an organization that, in the words of a
senior UN official, has never been in a worse
condition.
Politically the organization,
which was conceived as a link among nations, has
become the arena of a new confrontation between
so-called Third World countries and the
industrialized world. The
fallout of that clash did not
spare the current secretary general, Kofi Annan,
who after having sought to be all things to all
people, ended up being qualified by a major
African daily newspaper as "the African who serves
his white masters".
Administratively,
Annan's tenure was an unqualified disaster. The
Oil for Food Program, managed by Annan's UN
Secretariat, turned out to have been possibly the
greatest scam in history, and the sums diverted
run into the billions of US dollars. And while the
bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on
August 19, 2003, could not have been totally
foreseen, the number of casualties could have been
greatly reduced had a minimum number of
precautions been taken by the Secretariat.
As for Annan's vaunted "reforms", these
proved to have been a process of mindless
agitation producing no tangible results.
Ultimately, however, the most pernicious legacy of
Annan was the deification of his position, a
depiction with no ground to stand on except one
man's vanity run amok.
The UN Charter
describes the secretary general as "the chief
administrative officer of the Organization". In
practice, with political decisions being made by
the Security Council and management decisions
having to be approved by an uncooperative General
Assembly, his administrative authority is
practically non-existent.
Conversely,
while governments may entrust him with specific
political missions, this applies only in areas
where they either do not wish to get directly
involved or where their vital interests are not at
stake. No government will ever want the secretary
general to interfere in a question that it deems
of vital interest to its security.
The
result is that the secretary general's political
influence is inversely proportional to the
importance of the issue he deals with. He carries
some weight when dealing with marginal issues
involving second-rate countries and no weight at
all when major governments believe their interests
are at stake. Thus, ultimately, the job is to do
almost nothing but to do it well.
This
means not annoying any member states, making the
right noises, lending his presence to occasions
that member states feel require the cosmetics of
international endorsements, and ensuring that
administrative excesses are kept either in line or
out of the limelight.
Annan brought a new
dimension to the office. Rather than doing little
but doing it well, he did nothing but very well.
In all fairness, there was nothing for him to do
in the political arena. Alternatively the little
that could and should have been done as regards
management was left undone.
Doing
"nothing" had a prerequisite: inflating the
position of secretary general into the equivalent
of a lay papacy. To this effect, the
media-management machinery of the UN went into
overdrive depicting the "chief administrative
officer of the Organization" as " the spokesman
for the poor", the "symbol of UN ideals", and the
upholder of the "moral authority" of the
organization.
Fawning media fell into
step. The New York Social Diary magazine, of which
Annan had become a staple fare, portrayed him as
"aristocratic" and his wife as "saintly"; the US
Public Broadcasting Service made him into "a
representative of the highest ideals of the world
community". The New York Times marveled at his
"efficiency", while Time magazine portrayed his
wife as the "first lady of the world".
The
result of this deification was his re-election in
2001 to another another five-year term despite the
fact that normally his post should have gone to an
Asian. And later that year he received the Nobel
Peace Prize for having "brought new life " to the
UN.
By that time Annan had started to
believe that the image he had spun for himself was
for real. "He is convinced that he has a mission,"
commented one of his close aides. What that
mission consisted of was described by Annan
himself in no uncertain terms: he had a "sacred
duty" to promote peace. Administrating the
Secretariat clearly was now the least of his
concerns.
As long as the political
environment did not change, and no new demands
were to be made on the organization, he could have
sustained his performance throughout a second
term. But that was without taking into account
September 11, 2001, and the US invasion of Iraq.
As the clouds of war loomed on the
horizon, Annan proved increasingly uncomfortable.
Having inflated his post to the dimension of a
guiding light, he was now expected to take sides.
Suddenly, the man whom a close assistant had
defined as the ultimate fence-sitter found the
fence too narrow to sit on. As the crisis
developed, he went on appealing for negotiations,
referring to the "unique legitimacy" that only the
Security Council could provide and asserting that
war is an "issue not for one state alone".
While these words were anathema to the
administration of US President George W Bush, they
were still not explicit enough to satisfy the
opponents of making war on Iraq. Thus the man who
had built a career pleasing everybody ended up
satisfying nobody. In the days following the
US-led invasion of Iraq, Annan dropped from public
view. In New York it was an open secret that he
had lost his voice, and concurring diplomatic
sources confirmed that the illness had been
diagnosed as psychosomatic. The man's nerves had
cracked.
When he reappeared in public a
few weeks later, tranquilizers had helped him
regain his voice and his composure, but his hands
betrayed him; they were in a state of constant
agitation. On May 22, 2003, the Security Council
adopted Resolution 1483, which provided for the
return of the UN to Baghdad in what was
potentially its most significant, and most
complex, operation since the end of the Cold War.
Rather than choosing one head to run the
operation, Annan entrusted it to a committee of
some 20 members based in New York, who would act
on his behalf, and then he went for his yearly
summer vacation in Sweden.
On August 19,
2003, a car bomb blew up the UN headquarters in
Baghdad, maiming about 100 staff members, of whom
23 died, and sending the organization stampeding
out of Iraq. That October, former Finnish
president Matti Ahtisaari released a report on the
incident. It was a damning indictment not only of
the running of the Iraq operation but also of the
way Annan managed his shop - "dysfunctional" was
the watchword.
The bombing also marked the
end of the special relation between Annan and the
UN rank and file. Rather than being one of them,
he was now seen as a cynical manipulator who,
through sheer negligence, sent his staff to their
death. Overnight, he became the most hated man in
the UN system. When Annan's world started to
unravel, it did so with a vengeance.
The
Oil for Food Program had been the pet project of
the UN Secretariat under the direct responsibility
of Annan, who had personally chosen the man who
ran it. For years there was a suspicion within the
UN system that there were leaks within the program
but nothing substantive had ever been done about
it. Granted, member states never appeared
particularly keen to have the program investigated
and the temptation to do nothing was difficult to
resist.
After the fall of Baghdad to the
US invaders, the opening of the archives of the
Oil Ministry in Baghdad revealed the magnitude of
the Oil for Food scam that went into the billions
of dollars. Rather than vigorously dealing with
the problem at its inception, Annan
procrastinated, and it was only one year after the
scam became public that he appointed a commission
under Paul Volcker to investigate the matter.
This was compounded, on the personal
level, by the wheeling and dealing of his son from
his first marriage, Kojo, which culminated when he
imported into Ghana a luxury sport-utility vehicle
in his father's name. Kofi Annan had been given
diplomatic status in Ghana, his homeland, which
exempted him from duties and income tax -
inconceivable in a Western democracy but less so
in an African kleptocracy - and had contributed
one-quarter of the cost toward the purchase of the
car.
An outcry followed when the British
press discovered that the car had been imported
free of duty in Annan's name, forcing young Kojo
to reimburse some US$6,000 in duties to Ghanaian
customs. When a request was made to see the car,
the reply came that it had been moved to Nigeria,
where it had been destroyed in a fire. As for
Annan, he claimed not to be aware of the matter
and the question as to who signed the purchase
documents of the car was left unanswered.
While the peccadillo might have been
overlooked in others, it did nothing for a
self-proclaimed "spokesman for the poor" who came
from a country where half of the population
survives on less than $1 a day. And it assumed an
even larger proportion as it echoed the
conclusions of the Volcker report, which
identified Annan as a man who had been at best
negligent in discharging his duties and remiss in
upholding even a modicum of ethical standards.
It was an accusation that was certainly
not put to rest by Annan's refusal to disclose his
financial assets. And while the refusal was
legally sustainable - disclosure applies to all
senior UN officials except the secretary general -
it did nothing to enhance his the personal
standing.
The first priority for Annan's
successor will be to return the Secretariat to
what it should have been in the first place, a
lean and efficient bureaucracy that could
implement the tasks entrusted to it by the
Security Council and the General Assembly. Annan
had transformed the Secretariat into a sort of
court where cronyism was the rule. At one point he
surrounded himself with a 31-member-strong "senior
management group" in addition to 85 special
advisors or envoys plus six show-business
personalities as "peace ambassadors".
This
motley assembly included a special adviser for
Africa, a special representative for special
assignments in Africa, a special representative
for Iraq, a special adviser for Iraq, a high-level
coordinator for Iraq, a special adviser to prevent
genocide and, last but not least, a special
adviser for sports, all this in addition to an
undisclosed number of "consultants" on $1-per-year
contracts provided with diplomatic passports that
exempted them from duties and income tax.
While most of these were harmless, the
sheer number had both a distracting and a
demeaning effect on the organization. Getting rid
of that dead weight is a task that will require a
massive and ruthless housecleaning.
The
other priority will be to deal with the delusion
of "UN reform". That some "reform" is necessary is
unquestionable, that reforming the Security
Council is a non-starter even more so. Ultimately
what can and should be reformed is the
Secretariat. That is a task that can only
realistically be undertaken by someone who is not
a by-product of the very bureaucracy that should
be reformed.
Ultimately, the job will
consist of bringing the UN Secretariat back to
ground level where it belongs. In doing so, the
new secretary general will have to walk a fine
line between doing nothing and doing what can be
realistically done, knowing that, at times, he
will be given a task but not the means to
implement it and yet be held responsible if he
fails.
To this end, member states
ultimately get the UN secretary general they
deserve, with one caveat. As long as the UN
Charter remains silent on the job description of
the secretary general, the incumbent will
unavoidably put his imprint on the post, just as
the post is liable to corrupt the incumbent. Thus
the international community can only hope that
states, discounting professional experience, will
have chosen a candidate who, once elected, is
liable to retain a grain of common sense and the
modicum of a moral compass.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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