Mark Seddon assess the UN Secretary General’s performamce and warns against the reactionary forces ranged against him
Ban Ki-moon is focused on the real world – and on a broader canvas than the British media, obsessed about whether Barack Obama had snubbed Gordon Brown at the United Nations General Assembly in New York and so undermined the “special relationship’ – an obsolescence to which few Americans ever refer. Addressing the ranks of world leaders and diplomats, the UN Secretary General reminded them that their role was “to take risks, to assume the burden of responsibility, to rise to an exceptional moment to make history”.
Any reasonably informed observer could hear his words and think that, for once, they amounted to more than mere hyperbole. Multilateralism is back in vogue. Obama’s election as President of the United States against the backdrop of a worldwide economic crisis and seemingly endless, unwinnable wars was a signal that a majority of American voters had turned away from the unilateralism of the George Bush era.
Obama’s first term in the White House coincides with Ban Ki-moon’s tenure at the UN – an organisation the President describes as “flawed but indispensable”. That is a considerable improvement on
the state of near-constant attrition that existed between the second President Bush and Ban’s predecessor, Kofi Annan. Bush so disliked the UN and all its stands for that he appointed staunch neo-conservative John Bolton as his Ambassador to it – presumably with the aim of causing maximum disruption. It was an action not unlike making Derek Hatton secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
However, Obama may be coming to realise more just how important an ally Ban and the UN could be in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit on climate change in December and in the need for a co-ordinated global response to the financial meltdown caused by Wall Street and the City of London which has hit the world’s poorest hardest.
Two years ago, the UN General Assembly was dominated by talk of the “war on terror”. Now, with catastrophe facing the global economy and the climate, the talk is of co-operation and nuclear disarmament. Realpolitik as well as economic necessity may be playing its part in the nuclear draw down between the US and Russia. Certainly it played a part in Gordon Brown’s proposed sacrifice of a redundant Trident submarine. However, the whole basis on which international diplomacy is played out is changing before our eyes.
There is a price to pay for Obama’s resurgent liberal America, and for Ban’s UN, which has been attracting the ire of conservative commentators in the Anglo-America media.
For Obama, the opposition is visceral and highly visible. The strangely unifying combination of “God, guns and gays” is fuelling a powerful rearguard reaction to him in the US. Those who rail against Obama’s “socialism” reflect the historical dissonance of a substantial minority who reject any concept of global governance and have as much difficulty with the concept of their own federal government. For many outside America, that stereotype was was most apparent in Bush’s White House
Yet pollsters have consistently found a majority of Americans support the idea of the UN, expect it and their government to intervene against human rights abusers and do not want their country to retreat into an isolationist shell.
As the Obama administration works out what it wants from the UN and continues to pay its substantial arrears to the organisation, Ban Ki-moon moves into the second half of his first term as Secretary General. It helps that the financial crisis has encouraged global leaders to start talking his sort of economic language.
Perhaps for the first time, there is some recognition that the founding principles of the UN carry practical implications that go beyond the utopian. And that Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi’s tedious and embarrassing ramblings from the General Assembly podium were enlivened by his ceremonial tossing away of the UN Charter probably played into Ban’s hands.
On balance, the Secretary General impressed at the General Assembly gathering. Ahead of the game on both climate change and the need for a global stimulus package, Ban can take credit for providing the space and the arguments for a rapid reduction of the stockpile of nuclear weapons – providing that Iran and North Korea play ball.
But Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, cannot fight back in the conventional way against an array of critics, whose chief weapon is to attack his style while sidestepping the fact that they have a fundamental dislike of what he is saying
Ban does not seek controversy or unnecessary confrontation. Unlike some of his predecessors, such as Kurt Waldheim, Boutros Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan, there is no whiff of scandal. He has little interest in the trappings of office – which was confirmed to me by the Manhattan launderette owner who revealed that the Secretary General’s shirts had “all worn thin”. No child of the devastating Korean War would ever want to waste anything.
The difficulty for his opponents is pinning the man down. He ran for office in an open election, with the apparent support of George W Bush’s administration. He cannot be dismissed as a product of a developing world radical cabal. South Korea is a close ally of the US. But, even if he takes a moderate stand, such as against China over North Korea or weighing against Israel’s indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Gaza, this provokes a strident reaction against.
So far, much of the criticism of Ban has been restricted to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the Economist and neo-liberal-leaning foreign policy journals.
The most explicit and personally damaging came in the recent leak of a diplomatic note from Mona Juul, the Norwegian deputy ambassador to the UN, in which she lambasted Ban for being “spineless and charmless”. She described his work as “fruitless” and added that he lacked both “vision and leadership”.
This broadside gained widespread publicity and caused consternation inside the UN’s headquarters. Less was made of the fact that Juul had recently tried and failed to secure a senior job at the UN or that her husband, UN official, Terge Rod Larsen, had failed in his own efforts to gain promotions.
Perhaps it was sour grapes, but Ban’s opponents will continue to grow in confidence and audacity, unless he and his friends mount a serious fight-back on his behalf.
No leader should be above criticism or accountability, but such is the array of global problems mounting up in the Secretary General’s in-tray that pettifogging personal criticism is only an energy-sapping diversion from the job in hand.
Mark Seddon is Al Jazeera English’s UN correspondent and a former editor of Tribune
