It was over lunch in a top-class Paris restaurant that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan unexpectedly put the question to Ruud Lubbers, a professor of globalisation at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and the Dutch prime minister for 12 years until 1994.
Would Lubbers like to head the world’s major agency for helping refugees, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “I was surprised,” Lubbers said recently. “I knew very little about the issue. I had not applied for the job.”
But surprises had been part of his career, he added. If he was amazed by the offer, the Netherlands’ government was furious. It had nominated Minister for International Development Jan Pronk for the post. Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok put out a terse statement “regretting” the decision to bypass Pronk, but added that he was glad “an able, experienced and former prime minister, and another Dutchman, was chosen”.
The episode perfectly summed up the two problems with senior UN appointments. Rich Western governments feel they own the top jobs in the big money-spending programmes, rotating them among themselves. The secretary general, who makes the appointments, is not required to have a short list, let alone advertise the job or give the initial screening to a selection panel. Many former senior staff at the UN criticise the system, but nothing has been done to change it, despite lip service being paid to reforming the organisation.
Colonel Terry Taylor served as a political affairs officer at UN headquarters in New York in the mid-1990s. He believes changes in the selection procedure are needed. “We should make people compete for the top jobs and force governments to say why they wouldn’t find a particular person acceptable,” he argues.
In the UNHCR case, according to a former diplomat who represented his country on the UN Security Council, the Dutch probably felt they had a right to a top job “because they are a loyal and energetic member of the UN which pays a lot into the budget and haven’t had a Dutchman at a senior level for a number of years”. The UNHCR, led for the past decade by Japan’s Sadako Ogata, is close to bankruptcy after a shortfall in funding by the 14 governments that usually provide about 98% of its money; the body took $40-million of its $50-million in capital reserves last year to cover running costs.
Staff are hoping that, as a former prime minister from Western Europe, Lubbers will have the clout to get donors to be more generous for this year’s projected budget of $953-million. Another controversial recent appointment, that of Kenzo Oshima to head the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), was done on Annan’s initiative.
According to a UN source, Annan is dissatisfied with the work of a particular Japanese official in another post in the UN, and wants to remove him. To keep Tokyo happy (it is a big UN donor) he asked the Japanese government to nominate someone to head Ocha. When Tokyo picked Oshima, who runs the department of international peace cooperation in the Japanese prime minister’s office, Annan agreed.
Under the UN charter jobs are required to reflect an equitable geographical distribution that would befit a world body. For the roughly 1 800 jobs in the secretariat in New York a country’s economic weight, as reflected in its budget dues to the UN, plays a role. Britain had 56 of these jobs, according to figures from the mid-1990s.
When the figures are broken down for the senior jobs — those at department-head level and above — Britain had 10 out of 210, corresponding exactly to its contribution to the overall budget. The picture changes radically when it comes to the under-secretary general level and the heads of the main funds and programmes, such as the UNHCR, the UN Children’s Fund, the World Food Programme, the UN Development Programme and the UN Population Fund.
These are staffed mainly by people from the wealthiest countries, with the United States disproportionately represented. Given that Washington has for years refused to pay its dues in full, this discrepancy has caused resentment. These appointments are all made by the secretary general.