UN chief calms doubts about his leadership

Warren Hodge
February 19, 2007
International Herald Tribune
Original Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/19/news/nations.php

Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, after a rocky first six weeks, appears to have turned a corner in calming widespread doubts about his leadership at the United Nations.
There is no more rebellion, everybody is happy today, everybody says very nice things, César Mayoral, Argentina's ambassador, said Friday evening after a three-hour closed-door meeting that Ban held with ambassadors of the countries of the 192-member General Assembly.
After a similar meeting two weeks earlier, Munir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador and the leader of a powerful group of 132 developing nations, had accused Ban of bypassing established procedures and treating ambassadors as if they were members of his staff. The atmosphere is clearly much better, Akram said Friday. Today he said explicitly he will respect the process.
At the Feb. 5 meeting, Ban tried to gain rapid approval of proposals to restructure the UN bureaucracy with little of the consultation, review and justification of changes that countries traditionally expect.
That meeting brought mutinous stirrings. Ambassadors emerged charging that Ban was cloaking his affairs in secrecy and showing little regard for the need to justify his initiatives to them.
Ban had been criticized for appointing people to top jobs who had little experience in the areas of management that they were assigned to supervise, with little evidence that he had screened other, more suitable candidates.
The effect was to thrust Ban into the middle of the power contest at the United Nations, with the General Assembly on one side, and the 15-member Security Council and the secretary general's office on the other.
The assembly, a legislative body where poorer nations often exercise their capacity to stand up to the great powers, is particularly sensitive to feelings of being taken for granted, and that was the feeling that swept the hall two weeks ago.
Commenting on the new mood, Gerhard Pfanzelter, the Austrian ambassador, said, After the initial criticism, he started intensive consultations, which seems to have led to broad political support from the General Assembly.
He also modified or provided for review of his two major proposals. One is to divide the overburdened peacekeeping department into two — one for operations and one for field support. The other would give him more control over the disarmament department.
In the case of peacekeeping, Ban furnished details about how a unified chain of command on the ground would be maintained, a principal concern of countries that supply troops for missions.
He also agreed to present his proposal to two financial committees and a peacekeeping committee for review before presenting it for assembly approval.
The number of peacekeepers has risen to 100,000, the highest in the history of the United Nations, and could increase by more than 30 percent this year. Consequently, Ban noted, the leadership of the single department now in charge had become impossibly overstretched.
On disarmament, he abandoned plans to reduce the rank of the director of the office to assistant secretary general from under secretary general, a distinction that many ambassadors felt would have downgraded the office.
I have taken account of your concerns and revised my proposals, he told the ambassadors in opening remarks made available to reporters. I do not intend, nor have I ever intended, to bypass the normal processes and procedures of legislative review, he added.