The Race to Succeed Kofi Annan

By Megan Mulligan
July 11, 2006
The Washington Post
Original Source: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/needtoknow/2006/07/the_race_to_succeed_kofi_annan.html#more

It's Asia's turn, say the pundits, but it's still a wide-open race. Top names include a South Korean, a Thai and a Sri Lankan. The U.N. race has already spawned a tipsters' blog. Who Will Be the Next U.N. Secretary-General? We assess the candidates and the odds.
In December, after a rocky 10 years, http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/pages/sg_biography.html Kofi Annan of Ghana will step down. The rather opaque process to find his successor has attracted more press and public attention than any previous search. A University of Maryland School grad student, Tony Fleming, has even devoted a blog solely to the contest: Who Will Be the Next U.N. Secretary-General? as has at least one other (unidentified) blogger, at Chapter 15, a reference to the section of the U.N. charter. Like Alex Wilks's WorldBankPresident.org before it, these blogs try to get the inside story on the politics behind the pick.
According to Fleming, who says a November Washington Post story, Campaigns to Succeed Annan at U.N. Are Underway, sparked his own interest in aggregating the rumors and speculation, the race is about to heat up. 
France assumed the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council this month, taking over from Denmark, and is expected to lead a charge to produce a working paper detailing guidelines for the selection process. One new rule already has been put in place since the last SG race - candidates' now must be nominated by their governments. According to Fleming, it's worth noting that last time around, Ghana did not put forward Annan, the United States did.
At the moment, odds are on South Korea's minister of foreign affairs and trade, Ban Ki Moon, or Thailand's deputy prime minister, Surakiart Sathirathai, according to http://www.sportsbooks.com/ SportsBooks. Foreign Policy magazine writes a Sri Lankan presidential adviser, Jayantha Dhanapala, is the best bet. 
Fleming thinks July will see a groundswell of Asian sleeper candidates (and he does believe the next secretary-general will hail from Asia, more on that below) and that there will be a short list by the end of the month -- although he says the council will stay hush-hush until late September on names. It's also time for some to drop off the list for the first time since the search began. 
There are some worthy non-Asian long-shots, too. Some tout former Czech president and Velvet Revolution leader, Vaclav Havel . Others promote the current U.N. under secretary-general for communications and public information, http://www.shashitharoor.com/index.shtml Shashi Tharoor. And then there is the 42nd U.S. president, Bill Clinton. 
But those following the race, including some at the world body, are so caught up in preserving geographic, ethnic, and gender diversity that professional accomplishment and excellence only seem to enter the conversation after the superficial stuff has been debated.
Whoever is chosen, it seems likely that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton , will insist he or she was chosen purely on the basis of experience and skill. But the tradition of geographic rotation is a hard one to shake.
In the longer term, there are even more questions without east answers. Whose departures will Annan's precipitate? What does is mean for his reform package?
Fleming argues that the reform package, while it has a way to go, has been a successful project. By contrast, the Hudson Institute's Anne Bayefsky, who runs the Web site Eye on the U.N. , says, Reform has failed on just about every front. She suggests, however, that the next secretary-general may be able to lead the body in creating an unequivocal and unambiguous definition of terrorism, since the U.N. counterterrorism group has never named a terrorist group or individual or a state sponsor of terrorism. That action, she says, could give countries facing such threats(her example is Israel) the right to meaningful self-defense. Yet, she notes, The U.N. is composed of not-fully-democratic states, which in her view could make it difficult for anyone to make big changes at the New York headquarters.