WASHINGTON - It is very Asian, or
at least Confucian, that United Nations Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon and his team have kept so
close-mouthed about his decision to run for a
second five-year term, which was announced on
Monday.
Ban's first term expires at the
end of this year, and the vote for the next UN
head could take place by the end of June at a
General Assembly session. No other candidates are
in the running so far.
It would imply a
tremendous loss of face for Ban, South Korea and
even to some extent Asia, if he had overtly
indicated interest without being sure that that he
had all the ducks in a row. In itself, it suggests
some serious diplomatic skills to get member
states united behind his candidacy, not least
Japan and China, but he has clearly done so. There
has not been a serious voice raised in
opposition, unless there is a
serious misstep, and the reappointment will soon
be confirmed by the Security Council and General
Assembly.
It is possible that the last one
in the convoy was indeed a Peking, or Beijing,
duck, since he met the Chinese vice president last
week. Human Rights Watch criticized Ban for not
being more vociferous about human rights in China,
and it would have been a great gesture if he had.
But this would have been the diplomatic equivalent
of seppuku (ritual suicide).
Ironically, John Bolton, the rebarbative
former acting US ambassador to the UN, has
endorsed a second term for Ban on the grounds that
he did not regard himself as a "secular pope".
Bolton is not known for nuance, and he was a
strong supporter of Ban's original nomination.
Ban is South Korean, and thus reliably
anti-communist, and Bolton and others saw a grey
self-effacing bureaucrat who would not rock the
boat. But perhaps they should have listened. Even
on the hustings, Ban declared himself a strong
supporter of, for example, the International
Criminal Court, whose destruction was Bolton's
great, and unsuccessful, crusade.
On
issues like climate change, the financial crisis
and certainly on human-rights issues and the
Responsibility to Protect (the latter loved no
more by Bolton than by Beijing) he has been far
more outspoken than his predecessors.
To
begin with, he spoke strongly about particulars in
private, but in public expressed general
principles. In Myanmar (Burma) he told off the
junta, but kept lines of communication open
publicly. However, as he gained confidence, on
issue after issue he has become more open, more
precise in his delineation of principles and their
application.
On the Middle East, calling
for a Palestinian state, an end to the Israeli
blockade of Gaza and other UN positions forcibly
has not prevented his office being the first port
of call for Israeli politicians in New York.
Cynically, one can wonder if they are not
using it to claim government expenses for
fundraising trips to the diaspora's capital, but
for whatever reason, it takes the UN out of the
Israel Lobby's firing line in the US. This no bad
thing for the beleaguered UN since the lobby in
the US unites both conservatives and the liberal
politicians who in many other countries provide
the backstop for the UN's local support.
But that illustrates the dilemma. Bolton
is of the ilk that finds it difficult to admit
error, so he would not go out of his way to find
fault with Ban. Even so, in an op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal this week he called for the US
Congress to again cut funding to the UN to force
it to bow to Washington's and Israel's positions
on Palestinian statehood - without mentioning Ban
or his position. In times past conservative
critics like him could be relied upon to
personalize battles with the UN by belittling its
secretary general.
It does suggest that
Ban's outspokenness has been attenuated by his
earlier self-effacement. He has pushed the
boundaries of the sayable for the UN. Indeed even
human-rights organizations who criticize him for
not raising human-rights issues with China, have
admitted that Ban has been outspoken on other
human-rights issues, and indeed, during the Arab
Spring, he has singled out heads of state like
former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak for
criticism in a very public way, before
self-professed human-rights champions like the US,
whose recent statements on such issues have been
extremely expedient.
Indeed, he has broken
quite sharply with long standing UN practice of
servile deference to any head of state, no matter
how cruel or corrupt. One only has to contrast the
respect the organization and its emissaries
offered former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for
example.
In that context, it is perhaps
understandable that he demurred on public
criticism of Chinese human rights. It would be
somewhat Quixotic for the secretary general of the
United Nations, with, as Boutros Boutros-Ghali
once complained, no army nor police force, to take
a tougher stand than the member states who appoint
and give him orders.
Not least if it
knocked him out of office to be replaced by
someone else hand picked to be even more
complaisant. In the absence of the Madeleine
Albright and Senator Jesse Helms team that knocked
out Boutros Ghali, the Chinese are the only ones
to have nixed the reappointment of other
secretaries general - such as Kurt Waldheim.
But the dilemma of his second term is
inherent in such contradictions of office.
Sixty-five years after its founding, there has
never been such a concatenation of problems
demanding a global response that only the United
Nations is equipped to mediate. Climate change,
food security, energy shortages, financial crisis,
pandemic diseases, uneven development and a host
of other issues cannot be solved by any one
country, as even the indebted energy poor US is
now discovering. They demand global solutions
which entail a revived, re-energized and
modernized United Nations.
Once confirmed,
there are strong reasons to hope that, on his
present trajectory, Ban will be able not just to
say the right things, but also to inspire others,
his staff, the member states and the peoples of
the world, to do what is needed. He has shown
strong principles so far. Now he needs to inject
charisma-building steroids to ensure those
principles are heard.
Having secured
reappointment, he now has to draw up an agenda for
his second term that will inspire a jaded world to
unite against the common enemies and for Franklin
Roosevelt's Four Freedoms that originally inspired
the UN: Freedom of speech and expression, freedom
of worship, freedom from want and freedom from
fear.
Once he does not have to look over
his shoulder at Beijing and Washington about a
second term, he will have the freedom not only to
articulate positions that they would prefer
unsaid, but to marshal others as well. Even so,
one can be sure that while he will try to steer
boats, he won't try to rock them. He is a diplomat
above all, even if some might hope that he will
indeed become the secular pope that Bolton did
want!
Ian Williams is the author of
Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families,
Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
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