New Man At UN Has Made Friends – But Does He Have The Influence?

Ban Ki Moon is generous with his compliments — too much so, perhaps. The new Secretary-General of the United Nations was “very much impressed”, he said yesterday, with the way in which Gordon Brown “handled the terrorist attacks at a very early stage of his administration”. The Prime Minister was “firm and decisive” after the London and Glasgow bomb attempts, said Mr Ban, in an interview with The Times. “He tried to resolve the issue in a principled and composed way.”

That is generous; many saw the failed attacks as an atrocity that would have made any prime minister look good. It is also an interesting choice of compliments; in Mr Ban’s first six months, many have called him principled, but also accused him of failing to be firm or decisive.

His first weeks provoked alarmed criticism, then there was a lull as he responded to the complaints. “Now, the mood is dropping again,” said a senior UN official. “People are beginning to think that the problems are here to stay.” Mr Ban said: “It has been a very hectic six months for me, as it would have been for any secretary-general.” He added that “when I regard all these challenges I am very much humbled”, but that “I have learnt a great deal and made many friends”.

The biggest problem is not of Mr Ban’s making: it is that the UN is overstretched in the areas it does well, such as peacekeeping, while finding it harder than ever since its creation in 1945 to broker agreement between countries. Russia and China are not much more likely to side with the US and Europe than they were 20 years ago, while Brazil and India want their say, and the poorer countries are suspicious that any deal might be to their disadvantage.

Expectations of Mr Ban, former Foreign Minister of South Korea, were high when he took over from Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian and lifelong UN employee. Mr Annan’s closest aides are still staunch defenders but his tenure was scarred by the deep rifts over the Iraq war, by the US’s growing hostility to the UN and by the Oil-for-Food scandal and other allegations of misappropriation of UN money. Mr Ban would be calm, committed to tackling corruption and close enough to the US to bring it back into the fold, many felt. He is those things. In person he is direct, smiling, intelligent, and speaks good English, heavily laced with the vocabulary of consensus-building. The charge remains that he is too reliant on the US, has surrounded himself with Korean aides who do not understand the UN, and lacks the decisiveness to forge a path on the hardest issues.

He rejected the suggestion that appointing an American to the top political job meant that he was too close to the US. “That is not fair, at all. I am too close to the UK, people might say. I am very close to all the member states,” he added, less plausibly. “If you ask African countries, they really love me — I told them that the African challenge was top of my agenda. I have made good friends in the Middle East, Palestinians, Israel. Asians, of course, Latin Americans.” He concludes: “I am middle of the road — close to everybody.”

He added that since he took office he had been “encouraged the changing attitude of the US, which recognises the importance of multilateral action”. That is more due to the US’s chastened state in the face of Iraq’s turmoil than UN courtship. But it has made the UN’s main donor take “a very positive stand towards climate change and peacekeeping”.

Convening a climate change meeting on September 24 counts as one of Mr Ban’s successes; even more so has been persuading Sudan to accept a joint UN-African Union force, although that has yet to be tested. On these fronts, as well as the Middle East and Kosovo, Mr Ban said that he expected Britain to play a leading role.

On the Middle East, for years the most difficult area in which to identify a UN role, Mr Ban is less clear. On Lebanon, he is firm, saying: “I have taken measures to establish a special tribunal” on the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister. On the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, he maintains that “during my administration we have seen a much more energetic Quartet ”. Even if true, that owes most to the US decision to engage, and to the worsening crisis. Mr Ban said that the best use of Tony Blair’s time as the Quartet’s new envoy to the region “will be focusing on generating political will, in establishing institutions, and on socio- economic reconstruction”.

These flexible phrases do not take account of the crisis since Hamas militants took control of Gaza. His assertion that he warmly backed Mr Blair’s getting the job (“I was consulted by the US Administration”) does not suggest that he took a leading part in the decision.

Even the Middle East may be an easier problem than tackling the self- protective UN culture. He said that he intended to “lead by example”, that all his staff had submitted a statement of financial assets and that he hoped that they would all make it public — although they were not obliged to do so. An honourable sentiment, like the others. The question is whether the UN’s new head has the capacity for the confrontation needed to push through change.

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