The United Nations Security Council has confirmed that at 9.30am on Monday October 9 it will meet to nominate formally the next secretary general — and it will have been a genuine process of elimination. On Monday, the first council straw poll revealed the vetoes hitherto held up the delegates’ sleeves, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon had 14 votes to encourage his candidacy, and only one “no opinion”.
The other candidates had vetoes cast against them and, from the grin on the face of controversial United States ambassador John Bolton, we can guess who provided some of them. In second place was India’s candidate, Shashi Tharoor, who heads the UN’s department of public information. Tharoor, who saw the writing on the wall, made a dignified concession speech congratulating Ban on his victory.
While the campaign for secretary general has been the most transparent ever, with all the candidates responding to questionnaires and speaking at specially arranged meetings, the election was as murky as ever. At no point did the electorate, the Security Council delegates, actually go over the CVs and references of the candidates, or interview them, let alone discuss their pluses and minuses in a full session, formal or informal.
Instead there was a series of straw polls, designed to persuade the ill-favoured to drop out, and finally Monday’s poll, in which the veto-bearing permanent members had different coloured ballots.
So the process, insofar as it was designed at all, does not necessarily produce the most desirable, or even the most popular candidate, but rather the least objectionable. However, this is, in fact, what most countries want from a UN secretary general: the ability to talk to all parties without anger and arrogance and, above all, the ability to listen. Ban’s challenge will be to hang on to basic principles in the face of pressure, not only from the US but from China, which is no less partial to idiosyncratic views of multilateral norms and the UN charter.
The Bush (and indeed the Clinton) administration want, as Bolton has said, “more secretary than general”, but that is self-defeating. Like the papacy, the job itself confers and demands a moral stature and public adherence to the principles of the UN charter. Ban has stressed his support for that and for the more controversial (to the US and China) International Criminal Court, as well as the concept of the responsibility to protect.
So in that sense Ban is the very model of a modern secretary general. Throughout his campaign he stressed his search for “harmony”, and adduced his tenure as foreign minister of South Korea, balanced precariously between China, Russia, North Korea, Japan and the US.
In that light, it may also be premature to label Ban as someone who would dance to strings pulled by Washington.
He did say that the US was the “most important member” of the UN, but this is nothing more than the truth, no matter how unpalatable. In fact, the Chinese ambassador endorsed the statement after the announcement. It is, of course, a ÂÂreality that both China and the UN have to deal with.
But given the fact that South Korea is uniquely dependent on the US, with the ever-present threat from the north only balanced by the US forces, it has pursued a remarkably independent foreign policy over the recent years of what is, after all, a social democratic administration. One could say that is was more independent of Washington than Britain’s Tony Blair, who does not have the excuse of a belligerent nuclear-armed Scotland for his close adherence to American policy.
But Ban is not a South Korean delegate to the UN. When the General Assembly accepts, as it almost certainly will, the recommendation of the Security Council and nominates him next week, he will be the representative of 192 countries. There will be many people, not just the conservative US press or administration scrutinising his every move.
Listening to him speak took some observers back 10 years, when a previous US administration gloated that it had succeeded in placing “their” man, Kofi Annan — who was equally quiet and uncontroversial and, like Ban, no great rhetorician — in the secretary general’s seat. But quietness does not preclude holding principles, and certainly should not be presumed to mean total pliability, as the US discovered with Annan.