Does the position of UN Secretary-General allow for the incumbent to wield real power, or is he just a stooge of Security Council members?
Pretoria - The UN will vote in a new secretary-general this week. António Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, will soon become one of the most recognisable faces in the world.
But it is the glamour of the position that has eroded any real significance from what should be the mantle of one of the most powerful people in the world.
For starters, the secretary-general job doesn’t come with a definite job description. For some it is a “world moderator”, for others it is “chief administrative officer”. The Council on Foreign Relations describes the role as “vague”. The secretary-general must be everything and anything and therefore will often accomplish nothing.
Then there is the crisis of perspective and representation, as well as the UN’s undemocratic processes.
For many, like the former UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, Stephen Lewis, the nomination of António Guterres is a disappointment.
There has never been a female leader of the organisation; surely this year marked an opportunity for the world to appoint a woman as the chief mediator of global affairs?
For others, like fellow contender Christiana Figueres, the result was “bittersweet”. Ever mindful of the tremendous gender disparity at the UN, Figueres said it was given to “the best man in the race”.
Given Guterres’s record of fighting for the rights of the marooned and displaced as the head of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) from 2005-2015, he certainly seems so.
The “refugee crisis” and its derivatives, xenophobia, racism and marginalisation is easily one of the biggest challenges of our time. He will make a difference, the proponents argue.
But then there is a third group: those who have little regard in the UN as a vanguard for people’s rights and dignity. They believe the UN is simply too complex to navigate.
In the 1960s, the developing world argued for a candidate from outside the Western world and the UN appointed U Thant, Burma’s former representative to the UN as the secretary-general.
Despite his crafty mediation skills and efforts, he was unable to convince the US to end the invasion of Vietnam. In the 1990s, the Non-Aligned Movement wanted the next candidate to be from Africa and it got Boutros Boutros-Ghali from Egypt. It was on his watch that the Rwandan genocide took place.
Today, the call was for a woman to lead the organisation that Lewis describes as “the bastion of male privilege”. But as has been said of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the Oval Office, more has been made over the gender of the candidate, rather than the fact that little is likely to change for ordinary people, whether a woman, a man or a transgender person got the nod.
For this group of discerning observers, the UN has long been a farcical enterprise of the ruling elite, despite the good work of some of its footsoldiers who work hard and deep inside conflicts across the globe. It must relent to the five permanent member states that make up the UN Security Council (UNSC) - the US, China, Russia, UK and France - for its very survival.
Even though all 193 members will vote for the new secretary-general this week, it is the UNSC that shapes the calibre of the candidate. Indeed, if Guterres is confirmed later this year as the new secretary-general, he will inherit a UN facing a crisis. Never before in the history of the organisation has the UN faced such popular claims of impotence, illegitimacy and disregard.
Most of the blame has been placed firmly on current Secretary-General Ban-Ki- Moon’s shoulders, as a leader who has presided over some of the worst incidents in the organisation’s history.
Under his watch, UN peacekeepers have been involved in a litany of sexual violence against minors and civilian populations in the DRC and CAR. We are all outraged by Donald Trump’s comments about women but it is precisely this “boys-will-be-boys” attitude that has allowed such sexual abuse to thrive on UN missions in the field.
Peacekeepers were also found to have brought cholera to Haiti, unleashing a humanitarian disaster on the island-country already devastated by insecurity and natural disaster. Ban Ki-Moon’s disinclination to deal with these crises openly and with decisiveness has left the organisation’s reputation in tatters and the victims without a shred of redress or justice.
It is not as if everyone who joins the UN does not come with positive ambitions. But as anyone who has ever worked with the UN would tell you, it’s mangled bureaucracy turns energetic change-makers into dispassionate lards obsessed with self-preservation.
Samantha Powers, the US ambassador to the UN on the nomination of Guterres, describes the decision as “remarkably uncontentious (and) uncontroversial”.
This is a euphemism for servitude. And it is not a coincidence.
In his memoirs, Brian Urquhart, who was the personal assistant to the first secretary-general Trygve Lie, said the process of selecting a secretary-general almost certainly resulted in the appointment of a candidate “who will not exert any troubling degree of leadership, commitment, originality, or independence”. Likewise, Munir Akram, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the UN, wrote in February that Ban Ki-Moon has been “loyal to his benefactors”.
“This is reflected in the UN’s Western-oriented priorities over the past decade. All major UN departments and agencies are headed by representatives of Western powers.”
Guterres may be as efficient and principled as he wants, but he is likely to be forced to toe the line of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
* Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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