The
search for a successor
to Kofi Annan
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 27, 2006
LONDON - As UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan nears the end of his controversial term the
names being banded around to succeed him seem more
attuned to satisfying particular regional constituencies
than looking for the best person around.
A Jacques Delors or Mikhail
Gorbachev or Sam Nunn could never have become
secretary-general. At the time their names were talked
about it had to be an African candidate, and although
Annan has some sterling achievements under his belt he
has never quite had the freedom to be his own man. He has
had to live under the dark cloud of being the person in
charge of the UN's peacekeeping department in 1994 and
who failed to see what was going on in Rwanda when
genocide was unleashed and the world turned away. He has
certainly known that Washington would shamelessly use
that against him if he tried to take the bit between his
teeth, as his ousted predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali
did.
Today, insiders at the UN say it is
Asia's turn, or perhaps Scandinavia's which still lives
in the glow of Dag Hammarskjöld, the only
secretary-general who had the strength of personality to
stand up to both the Cold War superpowers. He created the
concept of UN peacekeeping and died in a plane crash in
1961 while mediating the Congo crisis.
A State Department memo written in
1945 put it this way: "He should be 44 to 55, fluent in
both French and English…It was generally agreed it
would be undesirable if the candidate should come from
the U.S.S.R or France."
One could well surmise that a memo
being written in the State Department today would say
much the same, merely adding the possibility of a "she"
and substituting Russia for the Soviet Union.
But it was these criteria that led
to the appointment of the shallow, vain and unimaginative
Norwegian, Trygve Lie, to become the UN's first
secretary-general exactly 60 years ago. He turned into a
stooge, accepting Senator Joseph McCarthy's purge of many
of the UN's best American officials, an act of vandalism
the organization has never really recovered
from.
Today in the age of a sole
superpower we need a candidate who can stand up to it.
Washington, since the Clinton era, has become
increasingly hostile to the UN. The Clinton
administration became adept at fobbing off difficult
decisions on the UN then used it as a public scapegoat
when things went wrong.
In Somalia it was not, as the White
House appeared to suggest, UN forces that attacked the
Somali warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, provoking the
killing of 18 American soldiers. It was the U.S. Quick
Reaction Force, acting independently from the local UN
command and operating under orders from Special
Operations Command in Florida. It is fair to say that the
UN has never since recovered the esteem in American
public opinion that it held before that Clinton sleight
of hand.
Can one imagine either a Republican
or Democratic president today echoing the words of Ronald
Reagan? In 1998, as the Cold War drew to a close, he told
the UN General Assembly, "A change that is cause for
shaking the head in wonder is upon us….the prospect
of a new age of world peace. The UN has an opportunity to
live and breathe and work as never before."
The old UN-baiter was prepared to
admit that he could hardly believe what he saw happening,
as the Soviet Union sought to do what the West had asked
it for 40 years, to make the UN the repository of all
international disputes, where they could be solved by
collective will. The way the big powers had worked
closely together to broker a peaceful resolution to the
Iran-Iraq war and the Cambodian civil war had deeply
impressed Reagan.
George Bush Sr built on this
goodwill and was able through the UN to build an
international coalition to face down Saddam Hussein's
invasion of Kuwait. If Clinton had possessed a similar
vision he could have made the UN work in the same
positive way. But Somalia broke the UN's spirit and
reputation and was compounded by Clinton's decision to
break a solemn promise made by the U.S. to President
Mikhail Gorbachev not to extend NATO eastward. This
alienated or marginalized the pro-Americans in
Moscow.
So who can resuscitate the UN,
bring Reagan's spirit back to life in Washington, and
make the big powers work together again? There is perhaps
one only person - the soon to be ex-prime minister of the
United Kingdom, Tony Blair. Fervently pro UN and pro U.S.
he is the only one on the horizon who has the stature,
the entreé and the skills to make the UN at last
live out its true potential.
Copyright © 2006
By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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