United Nations through the eyes of Ban Ki-moon

Interview

In balancing the interests of 193 UN Member States with the principles of the UN Charter, the Secretary-General handles the most complex problems in the world, ones which have no easy solutions. Ban Ki-moon prefers quiet diplomacy over the bully pulpit; and this approach has earned him unanimous support by the UN Member States for his second term. In this interview Michèle Griffin, Director of Policy Planning Unit in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, discusses the Secretary-General’s major areas of concern and possible challenges, and shares insights about his vision of the Organization and his role in it.

Interview

In balancing the interests of 193 UN Member States with the principles of the UN Charter, the Secretary-General handles the most complex problems in the world, ones which have no easy solutions. Ban Ki-moon prefers quiet diplomacy over the bully pulpit; and this approach has earned him unanimous support by the UN Member States for his second term. In this interview Michèle Griffin, Director of Policy Planning Unit in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, discusses the Secretary-General’s major areas of concern and possible challenges, and shares insights about his vision of the Organization and his role in it.

Interviewee: Michèle Griffin, Director of Policy Planning Unit in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General

Interviewer: Maria Prosviryakova, Russian International Affairs Council

Photo: Michèle Griffin, Director of Policy
Planning Unit, Executive Office of the
Secretary-General

What does Ban Ki-moon see as the priorities for 2013?

Member Sates set the priorities. So, the Secretary-General tries not to use the term “priorities” but obviously his job is to help Member States see the areas where their energy and their collective action might make most difference.

The Secretary-General has identified five major areas where he feels that the needs around the world are great and the need for collective action is particularly acute and the opportunities for collective action may be particularly great. Those issues thematically are:

• Sustainable development and climate change. Climate change is the defining issue of his tenure as Secretary-General and we can all see that it is only going to be more so. Obviously, there are big discussions happening right now at the United Nations about sustainable development and how, as the Millennium Development Goals come to an end, we make the biggest possible push to achieve those goals. Also, we look beyond the Millennium Development Goals period to what is called “the post-2015 Development Agenda”.
• Prevention. The Secretary-General feels acutely that we do not do enough to prevent disasters and violent conflict and that we should invest more in this. It is a very difficult thing to persuade politicians to do as they all have short term horizons. I think that is something where the voice of the Secretary-General can be particularly powerful.
• More safe and secure world. Addressing conflicts, where they are underway or are erupting, through better peacekeeping and partnerships with other organizations for peacekeeping, delivering humanitarian assistance to those in need. We have seen in Syria that even as the politicians try hard to push for a political solution there are so many refugees flowing out of Syria and so many still within Syria who are so desperately in need of help. So, the United Nations is there trying to give that assistance along with other partners.
  Disarmament, counter-terrorism and tackling drug-trafficking and international organized crime also come under that general heading. If you look at places like the Sahel region of West Africa, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen – you see more and more parts of the world where criminality, resource scarcity, great poverty, violence and extremism all come together in a horrible nexus of problems that people are suffering from. Addressing those problems goes beyond any one government or any organization.
• Nations in transition. The “Arab Spring” comes to mind but the Secretary-General sees transition in a broader sense, not just political transitions but also economic transitions. The world is changing in so many ways: politically, environmentally, and economically. The Secretary-General feels strongly about trying to bring collective action to bear in support of countries that are undergoing big transitions and doing so in a way where people can hold their governments accountable, where people’s voices are heard.
• Woman and young people. The Secretary-General believes that Member States should pay more attention to empowering women and helping them be more active economically and politically in their own countries. And the same for young people – to give them more of a voice in their own affairs and futures. In fact, he recently appointed Envoy on Youth to try to bring more attention to that issue.

So, those are the five global issues. Obviously, we also have geographic, region and country specific concerns that are dominating his day every day. Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Recently, the Secretary-General mediated the signature of a framework agreement so that the countries of the region and concerned countries around the world try to come together and support the DRC in trying to get out of insecurity that it has been in, particularly in the East. Supporting the people of Haiti to deal with both the aftermath of the earthquake and their perennial political problems is another issue on our minds. Those are just some examples of the things that occupy the Secretary-General’s mind on a given day.

What challenges and risks might arise along the way when pursuing these goals?

You can think about the challenges and the risks in two ways. There are the big political challenges involved in trying to get Member States to pay attention in this very crowded and complex landscape of issues and challenges that each of them is facing. To make a compelling case, for example, why do we need to pay attention to the Democratic Republic of Congo today, if we have so many problems on our own doorstep? We live in such a complex world in which problems we confront globally require so many different kinds of actors to solve, not just governments.

It is a big challenge to try to persuade political leaders that they should put political capital and attention behind this problem as opposed to that problem. It is hard to generate political will and momentum around any given issue. The political imperatives in capitals tend to be around: what is in the headlines? what do my electorates care about? where are my pressure point at home?

Photo: infosurhoy.com
United Nations Stabilization mission in Haiti

So, the Secretary-General speaks to heads of state and foreign ministers and tries to persuade them to look beyond their more parochial concerns and pay attention to what is happening a half of world away because this eventually might affect their people.

Then, the United Nations itself is exposed to risks around the world, as we are out there on the front lines trying to help solve a lot of these problems. But there is never enough money and there are never enough staff for any given issue you are always scrambling to try to line up funds and staff to scratch the surface of each problem. The same is true for domestic, foreign and finance ministers to have to turn around and argue domestically about “why we should give 0.7% of our GDP to overseas development assistance, when there are people starving or unemployed at home”. Right now in a time of austerity that is a particular challenge.

For the United Nations, the Organization’s reputational risk also can be quite high. The Secretary-General has to keep the Organization going, keep it credible, so that it can be helpful tomorrow and not just today. But every day we are out there trying to help people and push for a solution to a crisis or bring people together, we are risking being a bit of a scapegoat when things go wrong. Nobody really comes to the United Nations for solutions to the problems they can solve themselves, because why wouldn’t you solve it yourself and take the credit. So, we are involved mostly in the issues where there are no easy solutions.

Very often the Secretary-General finds himself having to speak out on the problems where Member States do not agree. So, if I had to single out one particular set of challenges and risks as it is seeing from the Secretary-General’s perspective it is those problems that are most acute globally but where Member States can not agree. Sometimes they not only disagree on what the solution should be, but even on what the problem is. We have seen it on climate change, on Syria. The Secretary General has no power beyond the power of persuasion. So, trying to help member states find unity around a real solution and not just the lowest common denominator solution is a daily challenge.

The first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, told his successor Dag Hammarskjold: ‘You are about to take over the most impossible job on Earth.’ And indeed, it must be really hard to balance between the national interests of each of the UN member states, and uphold the values and the moral authority of the United Nations at the same time. Given that, how does Ban Ki-moon manage to move his political and strategic vision forward?

You hit it on the head when you said “balance”. The role of the Secretary-General is above all a balancing act. We have 193 Member States but, of course, it is not just 193 voices because in each capital there is more than one voice on the issues that are being discussed at the United Nations. So, we frequently have a situation where member states themselves are not speaking with one voice on one issue. A Member State that is sitting on the Security Council might give us a mandate in the Security Council but then in the General Assembly where the budget to implement that mandate is negotiated, they might not be so generous about it. So, each of 193 Member States has its own set of interests and its own agenda and its own bilateral relationships that it needs to worry about even in a multilateral context.

Фото: www.southcom.mil
A Nepalese soldier providing security for the
United Nations watches as pallets of humanitarian
aid drop. Haiti, 2010

There is also a very complex UN system that the Secretary-General is sitting on top of. You have UN as an arena for Member States and you have UN as an actor in its own right and each part of the UN system has its own governing structure composed of different subsets of member states and its own funding structures with different incentives and they come from different budget lines and different ministries and their own mandates on the ground. Sometimes humanitarian entities in the system, whose main goal is to be out there on the frontlines feeding people, helping refugees, saving lives, do not want to be associated with the political agenda of the United Nations, for instance as coming from the Security Council So, the Secretary General is where all these come together. How to balance the need to save those lives with the need to find a political entry point, implement a mandate, support a government that maybe not everybody is completely comfortable with, or support combat operations. That can be a very difficult balance to strike and you are always worried about the security of your staff on the ground in those situations.

Then we have our normative agenda: the UN stands for something. We are not just implementing technical organization. We have a Charter that has a real message about peace, justice and development, we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international humanitarian law, refugee law – there is a huge body of norms, standards and principles that the United Nations stands for in the world.

People looked us to stand for those things but there are definitely cases where those norms might seem to come into competition with other objectives. For example, sometimes when the Secretary-General appoints a Special Envoy or a mediator to try to broker a peace agreement, that mediator is very often sitting around the table with people who have committed war crimes and should be held accountable for those war crimes. But he needs to get those people to sign a peace agreement right now to stop killing people and stop their soldiers and their constituencies perpetrating violence against civilians. We are never for postponing justice but sometimes we have to sequence things in a way that we can save the most lives, stop the violence soonest.

There are people who are uncomfortable with the fact that we might have to balance interests occasionally but that is the reality. As I said the Secretary-General has no power beyond the power of persuasion. He uses this persuasion in a way that is occasionally loud, naming and shaming people into action, and the occasionally quiet – behind the scenes. Pushing people to do the right thing is also a balance that he is constantly having to strike.

How do you believe the figure and style of Ban Ki-moon as the Secretary-General have changed the world’s perception of the United Nations?

Photo: gdb.rferl.org
The African Union-UN Hybrid Operation in Darfur

Obviously, Ban Ki-moon is different from his predecessors. I think over UN history each Secretary-General has been very different: they were from different parts of the world and had different personalities. You also can’t take the individual out of the context in which they operate.

Ban Ki-moon came into office at a time when the global financial crisis was just beginning to hit and has had to preside over the Organization at a time of massive austerity, and also a time when we are dealing massive transformation around the world. And those factors have naturally affected what he is able to do and how he chooses to spend his energies.

Similarly, he is in office at a time when climate change, and the boundaries and limits that we can push this planet to, are becoming increasingly clear.

You can not really identify the ways in which he has operated as being solely a feature of his individual personality or the fact that he is South Korean as opposed to from another part of the -world. But naturally they all play into it. What is interesting about the Secretary-General is that he is maybe the first Secretary-General who lived as a child through experiences that brought him into direct contact with what the United Nations stands for. He experienced war, he was a refugee, he saw the United Nations intervene in his own country. So, he feels deeply what the UN stands for. However, imperfect an institution it might be and however political it might be, there is no denying that Ban Ki-moon as a person deeply feels the importance of what we are trying to do around the world.

I personally think that you do see in his words and actions how genuine that commitment is and it is very inspiring. He is quiet. He is not always predisposed to be out there shouting from the rooftops. He uses his bully pulpit judiciously. Maybe in the second term he will chose to use it more energetically on certain issues. I can’t predict that, but I think that his tendency is towards a quiet diplomacy approach and I have seen that to be very effective. Especially because it is backed up by that total personal commitment to the issues.

What does Ban Ki-Moon see as the future direction of the United Nations? What is his stance on the reform of the Security Council (enlargement and the veto)?

The reform of the Security Council is a matter for Member States, and they are still negotiating and discussing that issue. It is a very difficult process with clear sets of interests. He has said on the record that UN Security Council reform is both needed and overdue.

It is important to think about Security Council reform beyond just the veto or enlargement. There is a lot that can be done to change and improve the working methods of the Council and its transparency even while the most difficult issues of expansion and/ the veto are being discussed. If you take the long view and look at the functioning of the Council over the long term: it is actually a very dynamic body and it has changed and adapted considerably over time. Its agenda has also expanded considerably over time in recognition of the growing complexity of the world peace and security in the extent to which issues of development, environment and disease and scarcity are having impact on peace and security.

Even though there is no restriction on the number of terms that the UN Secretary General can serve, historically no Secretary General served more than two terms. U Thant and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar declined to consider a third term, Kurt Waldheim’ third term was vetoed by China. Has Ban Ki-moon considered a third term?

I have never heard him saying any such thing.

Ms. Griffin, thank you so much for this interview.