First General Debate For New U.N. Chief
By Benny Avni
September 17, 2007
New York Sun
Original Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/62778

This time next week, New York's traffic will come to a stop, yielding to heads of state and foreign secretaries of the 192 members of the U.N. General Assembly, who will present their world view at Turtle Bay. For the first time, Secretary-General Ban will preside over the annual festivities, known as the GA's general debate.
Mr. Ban just moved to his official Sutton Place residence after roughing it at a Waldorf-Astoria suite since the beginning of the year, when he took office. Like the $4.5 million renovation of his beautiful four-story townhouse, however, Mr. Ban's takeover at the United Nations has yet to be completed.
This occasion is as good as any for a periodic assessment of Mr. Ban's performance. His instincts on most global issues remain sound. As a son of South Korea, which owes its success to American might and to a market economy, Mr. Ban refuses to fall into the numerous anti-Western and anti-capitalist traps Turtle Bay offers.
While he is frustrated by the United Nations' internal ethics, and financial and staffing failures, the hardworking Mr. Ban dedicates most of his time to the more glamorous business of international diplomacy.
Darfur has clearly topped Mr. Ban's agenda. He has cajoled President al-Bashir of Sudan, involved the country's neighbors, and pushed rebel groups to the negotiating table. After staking his personal prestige on the enterprise, Mr. Ban can cautiously point to tangible results, including next month's scheduled summit between rebel groups and Khartoum. In an even more obvious success, Mr. Ban has been able to avoid becoming the world's referee. Where his predecessor, Kofi Annan, commented too quickly on every top news item in the press, attempting to assure the United Nations centrality in world affairs, Mr. Ban is much more selective in his responses. To cite a recent example, Mr. Ban has refrained thus far from commenting on Syria's complaint about Israel's September 6 infringement of its airspace. Damascus's demand for U.N. intervention appeared half-hearted, and U.N. intervention would surely have exacerbated the situation. By rejecting advice from top aides who urged him to butt in, Mr. Ban may have frustrated some of us in the press corps, but he also avoided adding to regional tensions.
Mr. Ban gets lower marks from human rights activists. His success in Sudan is somewhat marred by the fact that next month's summit of rebels and government representatives will be hosted by Libya's Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, whose flexibility and contribution to peace in Sudan Mr. Ban has praised.
America has also embraced the Libyan tyrant of late, but by failing to mention Colonel Gadhafi's blatant human rights violations during a visit to one of his famous tents, Mr. Ban sent an unhealthy signal. Similarly, the secretary-general's response to a clampdown on demonstrators in Burma was much too cautious, even leading to a mild rebuke from America's mild-mannered first lady, Laura Bush.
On the other end of the Chinese spectrum, Mr. Ban rejected offhand Taiwan's recent unprecedented attempt at U.N. membership. This is an abuse of power, violation of the law. As secretary-general of the U.N., he cannot do this, President Chen of Taiwan told me during a video press conference Friday, noting that America, Australia, and Japan also told Mr. Ban he had overstepped his authority.
But unless it collapses soon, Mr. Ban's diplomatic success, as in Sudan, may end up overshadowing such missteps. His most glaring failure to date, on the other hand, remains his inability to rein in the U.N. bureaucracy.
While Mr. Ban recommended that all top U.N. officials make their finances public, to date only he and his hand-picked lieutenant, Kim Won-soo, have done so. Beyond personal example, furthermore, Mr. Ban seems largely uninterested in making sweeping changes to the way Turtle Bay conducts its business.
Mr. Annan created an ethics office to protect whistleblowers. But in an executive decision, Mr. Annan last year published a bulletin that allowed a separately funded agency, the U.N. Development Program, to declare exemption from the ethics office's jurisdiction. Rather than making an executive decision to reverse Mr. Annan's bulletin, Mr. Ban allowed the heads of the United Nations' satellite agencies and funds to dictate the terms and run circles around him.
It is hard to imagine how his success in the diplomatic arena, where he depends so much on a scandal-free United Nations, will last if Mr. Ban does not tackle internal issues with more vigor soon.