Tharoor wouldn't be 'India's
secretary general' By Kalinga
Seneviratne
SINGAPORE - Shashi Tharoor, a
candidate for the top job at the United Nations,
is clear that while he would be an "Indian
secretary general", he is not about to become
"India's secretary general".
While he is
grateful to the Indian government for putting
forward his name, he finds it "peculiar" that his
critics tend to harp on the point he is a
candidate from a nation vying for a permanent seat
on the UN Security Council.
"If anything,
it seems to me that one of the strengths that I
bring to this job is precisely the fact that I
have never pursued one country's national interest
or one country's foreign policy," Tharoor told
Inter Press Service during a Singapore lecture
tour last week. "I have never worked for the
Indian government a single day of my
life. I've been an
international civil servant, and my strengths and
credentials for the job come from my years of
service to the UN, as well as helping refugees,
humanitarian work, peacekeeping, the secretariats'
own cabinet and now the management of a rather
large department, which I was appointed to reform
and which I have successfully transformed in the
last few years. Those are my credentials, not my
passport."
Tharoor's visit to Singapore,
partly to drum up support for his candidacy in
Southeast Asia, was not organized by the Indian
government, but by a leading media research
institution based in the island nation, the Asian
Media Information and Communication Center.
Likewise, his public lectures were sponsored by
the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)
at the National University of Singapore and
Institute for Policy Studies, a local think-tank.
"Poised, articulate and possessed of a
clarity of vision, United Nations undersecretary
general Shashi Tharoor looks every inch the man
who could take over from [Secretary General] Kofi
Annan," wrote Clement Mesenas, editor-at-large of
local daily Today after Tharoor's speech at ISEAS
on the "Future of the United Nations".
Tharoor, who obtained a doctorate at the
age of 22 from the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US, joined
the UN almost immediately afterward. He since has
worked his way through the UN system and in 2002
was selected by Annan to be his undersecretary
general for communications and public information.
He started off with the office of the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) because
that body was looking for people with a
"generalist" academic background like his and
"because it was felt that what was needed was
people who are smart enough to be adaptable and
answer the various kinds of refugee problems
around the world", he said.
It was also a
part of the UN in which being Indian was not a
handicap because it did not have a country quota.
"In the regular secretariat, in those
days, Indians were already over-represented,"
Tharoor said. "So the net result was that I joined
UNHCR and what I thought of, as something that I
would do for a few years before going back to
India, became a lifetime career."
While
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has
personally taken up Tharoor's candidacy with world
leaders, he does not have a campaign manager or a
campaign staff, nor does he do any fundraising, he
said. He is encouraged by results of a "straw
poll" at the Security Council last week, he said;
he came a very close second to South Korean
Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon in the race for the
job.
Tharoor was way ahead of Thai Deputy
Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, who has the
solid backing of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations. Former UN disarmament chief
Jayantha Dhanapala, a Sri Lankan, came in a
distant fourth.
There are possibilities of
other candidates emerging well before Annan's term
expires at the end of the year. Names currently
doing the rounds include those of former Singapore
prime minister Goh Chok Tong, Kemal Dervis, the
Turkish chief of the UN Development Program, and
Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan.
Tradition calls for the secretary
general's job to be rotated among regions, and
many Asian countries have contended that it is now
their turn. While US President George W Bush has
conceded Asia's claim, the final selection has
always depended on last-minute haggling among the
five permanent, veto-bearing members of the
Security Council - the United States, the United
Kingdom, France, Russia and China.
"Asia
represents some of the biggest success stories on
the planet in the last 20 years," said Tharoor, a
strong believer that this is a time in history
when an Asian must lead the UN to give humanity
hope. "No continent has done more to pull
literally dozens of millions out of poverty. The
transformation of the economies of Asia, the
social changes of people on the continent, have
improved the condition of half of our planet.
"Therefore in some ways to have a
secretary general who represents this
transformative continent, who represents this
youthfulness, the energy, the drive, the
willingness to change, that Asia stands for will
actually be a fine symbol of the world as it is
today."
With the UN getting bad press in
recent years, he believes that whoever becomes the
chief of the world body needs to be as comfortable
in front of the microphone and camera as he is
behind closed doors in negotiating situations.
"We will not win every media battle,
certainly not," he said. "And we will not always
be judged to be right and we will not always be
right, but at least we should be able to explain
ourselves and what we're trying to do in terms
that the world understands. That's something that
I believe that I'm well equipped to do."
