Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

To Embody the UN

Le Monde | Editorial | 13 October 2006 | t r u t h o u t
Handing over his post in 1953, the first Secretary General for the United Nations, Norwegian Trygve Lie, described his job as “the most impossible one on the planet.” These words must have resonated for Ban Ki-moon, the South Korean Foreign Minister who was to be dubbed Kofi Annan’s successor by the UN’s 192 countries on Friday October 13.

January 1st, Mr. Ban, a 62-year-old career diplomat, will take the reins of the organization of which he must be, according to the UN charter, “the highest functionary.” This definitive restriction suits the Bush administration, which supported Ban Ki-moon, for it sees him as a harmless manager. The South Korean minister is close to the United States on UN reform and Iraq, but he is not a US vassal. Mr. Ban supports the International Criminal Court and was one of the artisans of an opening to North Korea.

The UN Secretary General must get along with the great powers – he is paralyzed without them – without alienating the rest of the world. The exercise is not glorious in any way and requires humility. It’s no accident that no big name (Bill Clinton’s had been bandied about) applied for the job in the end. Mr. Ban was “the best of the lot,” comments one diplomat. He’s an experienced negotiator who conducted a campaign in his own image: discreet, but methodical. He is determined, an indispensable quality for accomplishing a task Kofi Annan compared to Sisyphus pushing his rock.

Like his predecessor, Mr. Ban could be transformed by the function. Ten years ago, Mr. Annan had been chosen by the United States to replace a Boutros Boutros-Ghali deemed too noisy. And, in spite of the threat of a French veto, the Ghanaian, a little known UN bureaucrat, rapidly distinguished himself with his persuasive powers as his sole weapon.

While the UN had been promised a slow death by some, Mr. Annan opened it to the world, militated for humanitarian intervention and for those forgotten by globalization before receiving a 2001 Nobel Peace Prize and a triumphal re-election. Forgotten Rwanda, Bosnia. No superlative was spared at that time: “secular pope,” “rock star of diplomacy”. The war in Iraq and the “Oil for Food” program nonetheless hurt the morale and tarnished the end of his term.

The UN still remains today at the heart of crisis settlement with respect to the Lebanese, Iranian, North Korean issues. In ten years, the number of blue helmets has gone from 20,000 to 100,000 shortly. Mr. Annan’s strength was to embody the UN, its values as well as its limits. Will Mr. Ban know how to be “the world’s conscience?” We must hope so for him. The expression is not in the UN Charter, but it reflects the aspirations of the peoples it serves.

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This entry was posted on 14 October, 2006 by in Politics and Psychology, UN.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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