What does someone serving as UN Secretary General actually do?
For decades, emphasis has been
constricted to the title with very little about what it all entails. To
summarize, he manages the secretariat and mediates in global crises in addition
to executing instructions from the Security Council as well as the General
Assembly. So how daunting could this be to be considered by some, including
first UN Secretary General Trygve Lie as the most impossible job in the world?
For one thing, the UN is a complex
mosaic of organizations that operate with dissenting voices having contrasting
interests, and not simply a private company whose owner can will it to any
direction he deems fit to catch in on earnings. Managing over 9000 staff in New
York and related offices and moderating between the interests of the General
Assembly, Security Council and other major UN organs definitely takes the
breath of a dragon.
The expectation of citizens in every
sate around the world is that since their governments contribute to the UN, the
Secretary General in turn must support only the decisions that are most favorable
to them. Their governments and statesmen keep presenting him with difficult
problems that are neither within his administrative nor legal capacity to resolve.
North Korea is asking him to uplift the US-led United Nations Command in Korea;
the Southern Cameroon National Council (SCNC) is asking him to ratify the “independence”
of Southern Cameroon and arrest and try Cameroon’s President Paul Biya for
crimes against humanity; the European
Union wants him to speed up gender reforms; the Iranian leadership is demanding
that he suppresses any suspicion on the intentions for its nuclear program
being for peaceful purposes; South Korea wants him to categorically hold North
Korea responsible for last year’s bombing of its naval vessel “the Cheonan;” the
United States is asking him to back its efforts to downsize troops from
Afghanistan; both Israeli and Palestinian officials are seeking his recognition
to their sovereign claims; and even gays are charging him to address issues
related to their sexual orientation and offer recognition to their gender
identity. At the same time, warring parties engaged in atrocious acts of human
rights violation in some conflicts detest any UN involvement, demanding that
the Secretary-general stay-off. In the end when lives are lost, he is held responsible
and considered a traitor, and gold bounties are placed on his head like was
done on that of Kofi Anan in 2004.
This indeed is a difficult job – so
difficult that even the inspired architects of the UN found it hard to conceive
of the role in concrete terms. Prior to the creation of the organization, one
of its founding fathers, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had conceived of
the role as that of “world moderator.” Drafters of the UN Charter rather opted it
to be that of “chief executive officer” and today’s generation methodically confuse
him to be “president of presidents.” The Secretary General suddenly finds
himself having to choose from this confused conceptualization to build his
leadership while risking developing one of his own.
Evaluation of the performance of the Secretary
General is greatly shaped by every country’s view of its position in the
international arena of competing interests. Many who have blamed current
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for being an uncharismatic, unimaginative,
unassertive lame dock offer little help in exploring ways in which the job can
be better performed with regards to practicality, legitimacy and effectiveness.
They have mostly wished to see a superman providing hypnotic solutions to the
world’s problems. A snap-shot assessment of his role is neither in the best
interest of the organization nor that of the international community.
It is true that the Secretary General
is the representative symbol of the UN but while his employers sought to project
him to such a status, they wittily or unwittingly limited the amount of power
and influence he could ever exert. Far more could have been expected of him if
he had his own trump card like the Security Council members and could have had a
bolder voice in issues of hard power, and not just in the soft themes of
development, climate change and poverty.
It is enormously challenging to
attentively listen to 193 mostly conflicting and often threatening voices, yet
remaining impartial as required by Article 100 of the Charter. The Secretary
General is expected to withstand pressures from bossy Security Council members
whose strategic interests must be protected at all times. They are mostly the
financial engine of the organization. The burden of aggressively persuading them
to take action for common good or refrain from taking action for their
self-gains lies with him and he is expected to succeed at this even without
being a decision maker himself. He is asked to mobilize global support,
including from wayward and rebellious member states and is charged with upholding
the values and moral authority of the UN, speaking and acting for peace even at
the occasional risk of challenging and disagreeing with the member states.
Lashing out criticisms at the Secretary
General without properly understanding the context within which he functions makes
us unruly hangmen of an organization that is trying to rebound itself and adapt
more effectively in critically challenging times.
The job of UN Secretary General might
not only be the most difficult but could also be the most easily misinterpreted
job on earth! In current uncertain times when the world demands and looks even
more to the UN for solutions to critical problems, there is need to have proper
understanding of the role of the Secretary General beyond the lofty but
disoriented traditional view of him as owner of the UN enterprise. It would be
helpful to particularly discern what he cannot do as a measure of moderating
expectations of the job. This in itself could be an important starting point to
overcoming the problems.
Of course, the Secretary General could
have problems and weaknesses of his own, but it could prove helpful seeing the
UN’s failures as a result of ill-conceived structural and ideological processes
that include ambiguity over the role of Secretary General. The five permanent
Security Council members remain at the core of decision making at the UN. The
Charter granted them unrivalled powers, especially in the veto and it might not
be in the Secretary General’s legal or administrative ability to bend their
will in substantive issues related to hard power.
Tandia T. Vernasius teaches in the Department of International Relations
at Daegu University. He may be contacted at tvtandia@gmail.com.
