When Ban Ki-moon visited Washington for the first time as United Nations secretary general in January 2007 to speak at one of the city's most prestigious foreign policy forums, hundreds turned up to size up the man heading the world organisation.
Boredom and disappointment set in quickly. A bland speech, one platitude on top of another, had the audience checking their phones and BlackBerries or slouching in their seats for an early evening doze.
The South Korean is now in his fourth year of a five-year term in office but the impression he left that evening at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies has not improved in the intervening years. One foreign policy analyst, ranking the eight secretary generals since the founding of the UN in 1945, placed him joint bottom.
The disquiet about Ban became public this week in a leaked 50-page internal memo sent to him from one of his inner circle, under-secretary general Inga-Britt Ahlenius, before she left office. "I regret to say that the secretariat is now in a process of decay. It is not only falling apart … it is drifting into irrelevance," wrote the Swede, who was in charge of financial oversight of the UN. She described Ban's failure to fill key posts and other decisions as "deplorable" and "seriously embarrassing for yourself".
Ahlenius is concerned mainly with what she sees as interference in her department. But interviews with senior UN staff, politicians and diplomats by the Guardian over the last year confirmed that the unease is widespread throughout the UN. Even staff loyal to Ban in public will admit in private that, though a nice, affable and hardworking secretary general, he has struggled to make an impact in international affairs and that the organisation has been seriously weakened.
One recently retired UN official said that one of Ban's biggest handicaps was his lack of fluency in English, which made it difficult for him to win over audiences in the US and elsewhere. "We have got him diction lessons and media training," the former official said. The diction lessons, sometimes as often as two to three times a week, have helped, but not enough. "We advised him to make fewer television appearances. He is a hard sell."
Ban is up for re-election next year by the UN general assembly and, with the backing of China and probably the US, he will almost certainly secure a second five-term term, taking him up to the end of 2016. But criticism such as that by Ahlenius will not help, and there are hints that the Obama administration is becoming unhappy about his stewardship of the world organisation.
In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year in Washington, Ban indicated he is likely to seek a second term. But he acknowledged the personal hurt caused by criticism of his performance, insisting it was unfair. "As a public servant, I know that my performance of my job needs to be constantly under scrutiny and I welcome any constructive criticism … Sometimes I have found some of such criticism has been based on misunderstanding or not fully appreciating what kind of person I am and what my job requires me to do."
Courteous and friendly, he became agitated only once during the interview, when asked about criticism of promotions within the UN of Siddarth Chatterjee, his son-in-law, a former major in the Indian special forces.
"This kind of thing is just unfair. He joined [the UN] 15 years before I ever joined," the secretary general said. "He is a professional person, a very distinguished person. When he was transferred from Kenya to Iraq, do you think it was nepotism? If someone wants to give a favour, [would he move a person] from Kenya to Baghdad, which was regarded as dangerous? … It is criticism for the sake of criticism." Ban apologised afterwards for becoming what he described as "emotional".
Asked to list his achievements, he said modesty required it to be left to others to make that judgement, before going on to list what he regarded as three successes: climate change, UN administrative reform and the championing of human rights.
Denying the December Copenhagen summit on climate change had been a failure, Ban said: "No, I don't think Copenhagen was a failure. There was room for improvement in procedure, in how we can make it more inclusive or transparent, but when it comes to substantive elements, I think it was quite a success."
Copenhagen was the turning point for Steve Schlesinger, a former UN staffer and author of Act of Creation, about the organisation's founding. Schlesinger, who had been initially supportive of Ban, said he became increasingly disenchanted. "I soon enough became concerned about his inability to communicate well, and even more troubled by his seemingly futile efforts to resolve various crises around the world," he said.
He described Copenhagen as an abject failure. "After all, global warming had been his singular cause. This is the one issue on which he was most passionately identified," Schlesinger said.
Thomas Weiss, politics professor at the City University of New York and author of several books on the UN, is even tougher on his record. Asked to rank Ban alongside his predecessors, Weiss placed him in joint last position alongside Trgyve Lie, the Norwegian who presided over a long list of diplomatic failures, and Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian whose controversial role in the Wehrmacht during the second world war only fully emerged after he had left office. "Each tarnished the UN in different ways and accomplished very little," Weiss said.
Weiss compares Ban unfavourably with his predecessor, Kofi Annan, who is charismatic, a good media performer and popular in Europe and elsewhere round the world for standing up to the Bush administration over the Iraq war.
"While it is perhaps unfair to compare the current secretary-general with his telegenic and charismatic predecessor, Ban Ki-moon has set a new standard for being invisible," Weiss said, adding: "I think he feels comfortable with blending into the background."
At the UN headquarters in New York, at present undergoing a major refit, Ban's staff defend him in public, saying that their boss operates best out of the limelight – what they call quiet diplomacy, private conversations with world leaders, avoiding embarrassing or hectoring them in front of television cameras.
Kiyo Akasaka, UN under-secretary general for communications, who is Japanese, sees the problem as a cultural one, a clash of east and west. Asians, he said, appreciate his Confucian values, the emphasis on self-effacement, self-discipline and understatement. "To eyes of Asians, his behaviour has been like that of the wise man, the sage in Oriental philosophy who does not speak as articulately as you might expect in the leaders of the western world," he said. "I can see that the Western world has a different kind of expectation in its leaders, including the element of charisma."
Nick Haysom, a South African who is Ban's director of political affairs, blamed the media, saying the secretary general was frustrated over being caricatured as invisible when he made outspoken comments that the media then failed to report.
Haysom, who was former legal adviser to Nelson Mandela, dismissed objections of the UN being run by a South Korean clique, with Ban placing Koreans in several key posts, including Kim Won-soo as his deputy chef du cabinet.
Haysom praised Kim, who he said was unfairly portrayed as an eminence gris, saying he was an extremely productive member of the team.
Joseph Nye, one of most respected foreign affairs analysts and still supportive of Ban, believes he will get a second term. The Harvard professor, who taught Ban and who was a senior figure in the Clinton administration, said: "He had a hard act to follow, given his predecessor's charisma and media skills, but note that good relations with the security council is essential to effectiveness, and Ban Ki-moon has managed that well."
Ban was appointed to the job mainly because it was Asia's turn, under an unofficial rotation system, and partly because the Bush administration wanted someone less outspoken than Annan.
John Bolton, the neoconservative hawk who at the time was US ambassador to the UN, an organisation he is hostile towards, acknowledges that he supported Ban because he wanted an administrator rather than someone who used the UN as a pulpit. "Ban is not, as his predecessor was, the secular pope. As a Lutheran, I don't believe in religious popes or secular ones. Mother Teresa had moral authority. The secretary general does not," Bolton said.
The Obama administration, unlike the Bush administration, might prefer a bigger presence at the top of the UN than Ban but is unlikely to block a second term, not wanting to offend South Korea, where he is a hero.
Asked about a second term, Ban hesitated and smiled. "It is too early for me to think about my future second term." But his subsequent words were a virtual confirmation that he would. "Of course, if member states want, I am ready to serve."
But Schlesinger, though he describes Ban as "a nice man with a good heart who wants to do the right thing, even if this job seems beyond him," is not in favour. "If he were to retire and not seek a second term, not a lot of people would be upset," he said
No comments:
Post a Comment