While candidates jockey for the job of head of the UN, Ayman El-Amir looks at the challenges ahead for whoever lands this unenviable position It has been called the most impossible job in the world for which no one is fully qualified. Yet there has been a train of hopeful candidates knocking on the doors of the United Nations Security Council, and of media outlets, each announcing his or her keen interest to become the next secretary-general when the current one, Kofi Annan, steps down at the end of December. There is no job description or benchmarks for performance as the UN Charter provides only a general procedure for selection but no conditions under which the secretary-general may be censured, impeached or fired even for a scandal like the $64 billion oil-for-food outrage, or the genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica. With no job description at hand, no performance appraisal system, no measure of accountability and a seemingly irreconcilable, chaotic and unilateralist world order, why would a dozen eminent statesmen, including presidents, ministers and senior diplomats seek what has generally been described as a thankless job? By what criteria will one of them be selected over the others? For one thing, the post will have to be filled and the job has to be done. Personal ambition in the face of global challenges may be counted as another factor. None of the erudite candidates has any illusion about the scale of the woes of the world in which we live. But the scene from the 38th floor office of the secretary-general in the matchbox-like secretariat building is also beguiling. Looking down on the serpentine course of the East River on the one side, and up to the glittering pinnacles of New York City's towering skyline on the other, in a moment of nocturnal solitude, it is difficult to resist the feeling that the man at the top is on top of the world. However, it is a different reality when the same man climbs down to the second floor where the Security Council chamber is located, when he attends General Assembly sessions or when he travels to Washington, DC. He is caught between two hats he has to don: the honorific title of the "world's chief diplomat" and the more mundane, bureaucratic title of "the UN's chief administrative officer", as the US likes to remind him. True, the UN Charter -- the constitution of the world organisation -- provides in Article 97 that the secretary-general "shall be the chief administrative officer of the organisation". Yet two paragraphs below, Article 99, stipulates that, "the secretary-general may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security" -- a clear political mandate. The dilemma is both a paradoxical reality and a pressing necessity. At change-of-guard junctures multiple proposals have been floated to divide the responsibilities of the secretary-general among as many as four deputies for economic and social affairs, administration and management, peace- keeping and development. When Boutros Boutros-Ghali came to office in 1992, he, a lone-operator, firmly rejected all such proposals, whether formal or informal. But his successor, the now outgoing Kofi Annan, was more amenable to the General Assembly's idea of a deputy secretary-general and Louise Fréchette -- a Canadian national -- was soon appointed to the position in March 1998. However, the idea of a division of labour did not have an adequate test of time to show that the secretary-general could indeed shed administrative responsibilities and focus exclusively on political and diplomatic affairs. Member states of the United Nations often look askance at the idea of a political role for the secretary-general. They invariably want to control that role by subjecting its exercise to their oft-tenuous consensus, not the prudent judgement of the secretary-general. In February 1998, one year after he was elected, Annan won Security Council approval to travel to Iraq to try to defuse an escalating military situation in which the US threatened to launch a bombing campaign against Iraq for lack of cooperation with the inspectors of the UN Monitoring, Observation and Verification Commission in Iraq (UNMOVIC). He was strictly instructed not to go beyond the terms of a Security Council resolution that ordered Iraq to cooperate fully with the inspectors or face the consequences. Annan arrived in Baghdad on 20 February saying that he had "a sacred duty" to defuse the crisis. He had a three-hour meeting with President Saddam Hussein and then immediately flew back to a hero's welcome in New York by secretariat staff and media representatives for having prevented an imminent war situation. That was the intrinsic role of the secretary-general. He also angered some conservative Republicans in Congress by saying he thought that Saddam was a man he "can do business with". Nevertheless, 10 months later, in December 1998, the US was again raining hundreds of cruise missiles on Baghdad and other sites, resulting in considerable human and material losses. That the UN is a cobweb of incompatible wills and interests is the first lesson any new secretary-general learns once he is in office. That is, perhaps, the lesson former secretary-general Boutros-Ghali missed and it eventually proved to be his nemesis. As an intellectual and a world-travelled envoy with suave manners, he saw the UN as an executive mechanism in a world full of problems. He went to work not mindful of the delicate, and sometimes sinister, balance between member states' individual interests, the secretariat's bureaucratic responses, and global problems. To maintain this balance requires someone who either has the skills of a juggler or the blind trust of a board of directors. The debacle in Somalia in 1993, when 18 US servicemen were ambushed and killed by Somali militiamen loyal to warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, whom the Americans were hunting down, marked the failure of the UN mission in Somalia. The UN secretary-general's efforts to turn the Somali mission (UNOSOM II) from a humanitarian assistance mission into a nation-building exercise failed to create a new state of Somalia and had far-reaching implications for other crisis situations in Africa. The Rwanda genocide -- where rival Hutu militias butchered an estimated 800,000 to one million Tutsis and their Hutu sympathisers in a matter of three months -- was a direct result of the Somalia set-back. After the US withdrew from Somalia in 1994, the State Department put Africa at the bottom of its priority list. Warnings, pleas and desperate calls from the commander of the small Belgian battalion in Rwanda for intervention to forestall the impending genocide fell on deaf ears on the 38th floor and in the Department of Peace- keeping Operations then headed by Annan. When hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were hacked to death no one resigned in protest, though four years later Annan apologised. The world the new secretary-general will face when elected is markedly different from the one that existed when the UN was created in 1945. Not only have the old problems of war, poverty, epidemics, famine, violations of the dignity and worth of the human person and gaps in development and standards of living proliferated, but also the UN's capacity to confront such issues has been seriously weakened. The universality of the post-World War II dream "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom", as articulated in the preamble to the UN Charter, has all but vanished and been replaced by the pressing demands of competing nationalist interests. What seemed to be a flexible, self-correcting mechanism that was developed by the founding-fathers of the world organisation for future generations, enshrining the lessons of two world wars, has been petrified by a Medusa gaze of myopic ideologies and competitive policies. New problems of terrorism, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, global warming, pollution and declining standards of living have been added to a teeming agenda, with little imaginative thinking and drive to curb these scourges. Peace-keeping did not exist before 1949, neither by definition nor by provision in the UN Charter. It was literally invented by two legendary figures of the early years of the UN: Undersecretary-General Sir Brian Urquhart of the United Kingdom and Assistant Secretary-General Ralph Bunche of the US. When the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 ended in a truce, the two men and their assistants thought of a way to have a UN-appointed force, unarmed, to observe the truce, ensure its was being maintained by all belligerents and report any violations. It was called the UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO). It still exists until today and will disband only when a final peace agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbours has been signed. Peace building did not fare well when it was tried during the decade of the 1990s as peace-keeping demand and deployment peaked, with nearly 70,000 international forces on mission assignments around the world. The UN then was facing unconventional crisis situations of civil war and internal strife and had the military force, but not the intellectual capacity, to deal with them. That is what happened in the former Yugoslavia, highlighted both by the Bosnian war and the genocide committed against the civil population of Srebrenica in 1996. Africa fared worst on the UN agenda of peace-keeping. In addition to the 15-year-old civil conflict in Somalia, the war in the Congo was rightly dubbed "Africa's World War" where between 1998 and 2003, almost four million people were killed. This is not to mention the brutal civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Ethiopian-Eritrean dispute that is fanning out to Somalia and the human catastrophe in Darfur. The new secretary-general will have to deal with an international situation that is not only more complex but even more dangerous than the Cold War era in which the UN was born. By comparison, the Cold War had developed a discipline of self-preservation mechanisms and a sense of responsibility that guarded against the outbreak of all-out nuclear war. It was called the balance of nuclear deterrence -- the ability of both superpowers of the time, the United States and the former Soviet Union, to launch nuclear retaliation against the other in case of surprise attack. In the world of the first decade of the 21st century, nuclear proliferation is on the rise, the balance of power is lost, the global environmental degradation is increasing, cohesive national entities are fragmenting and global violence as a means of redressing political injustice and military domination has become phenomenal. The past 15 years of global unipolar military domination by the US has worsened open wounds and created new ones. A Pandora's box has been opened in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of the global war on terrorism. By all criteria, the situation in both countries is getting worse, despite all claims to the contrary by the Bush administration. NATO is precipitously venturing out of its traditional role as a defence alliance protecting Europe to taking a bellicose role in Afghanistan. In retrospect, the downfall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the US as the world's sole and unchallenged superpower have also marked an upsurge in unilateralist tendencies in US foreign policy. In the words of Strobe Talbott, former US deputy secretary of state, the guiding principle before the Bush administration used to be "together if we can, alone if we must." The Bush administration turned it around into, "alone if we can, together if we must." Although this became a more visible, more aggressive policy, under the neo-conservative Republicans of the Bush administration, its origins can be traced back to the Clinton administration and the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. That war was a brilliant piece of coalition building by the savvy former US secretary of state Henry Baker III. No single country of the coalition that contributed 525,000 troops under the UN flag could question the clear case of having to drive the invading army of Iraq out of the territory of a sovereign member state of the UN -- Kuwait. Since, there has been a gradual withdrawal from multilateralism. The signing by president Clinton of an executive order in 1996 banning the participation of US troops in peace-keeping operations under non-US command may have been a justified reaction to the Somalia disaster two years earlier. However, the first serious unilateral military action outside the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council came with the 1999 US-led NATO air campaign against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to loosen the strangulating grip of the late president Slobodan Milosevic on Kosovo. At the time, UN Secretary-General Annan saw it as a morally justified trendsetting episode and told the General Assembly that no country should be allowed to persecute its own people and hide behind the prerogative of national sovereignty. Full departure from UN authority occurred with the Anglo- American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which President George W Bush insisted was done in the name of the UN although the Security Council had denied him and his collaborators that prerogative. When the US and the UK eventually quit Iraq -- and they will -- they will be leaving behind a war- torn and politically fragmented country where ethnic/civil war, terrorism and economic collapse will be the legacy of a failed US strategy in the Middle East. It will be left to the UN to clear the debris. Time will tell whether this tragic misadventure was a testimony of UN inadequacy or an ill- advised crusade. The Security Council's pseudo-Free Masonry process of selecting the secretary-general is tricky and unpredictable. Most renowned past secretary-generals came to the position unannounced. Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second secretary- general whom every successor tries to emulate, came to the post as an act of serendipity. During his tenure, he proved both excellent in administrative skills and political acumen. He was probably the last secretary-general who spent a sleepless night writing a letter of resignation and had it ready in his pocket as he appeared the next morning to address the Security Council on a critical issue of peace-keeping; ready to offer his resignation in case the council disagreed with his strategy on how to resolve the Suez crisis. Although the UN Charter does not provide for the geographical rotation of the post of secretary-general, it is generally assumed, and China insists, that it is Asia's turn. The list of aspirants includes the ostensible frontrunner, South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon -- whose candidacy now seems assured, according to the latest "straw poll" acceptance test -- Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Surakriat Sathirathai, whose prospects seem to have been dimmed by the recent military coup in his country, former UN undersecretary-general for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala, now advisor to the president of Sri Lanka, UN Undersecretary-General for Public Information Shashi Tharoor of India, former Afghani minister of finance Afghan Ghanis, Jordan's Ambassador to the UN Prince Zeid Al-Hussain and Pakistan's former ambassador to the UN Madiha Lodhi -- the only woman candidate from Asia who has apparently been introduced to counterbalance the candidacy of Shashi Tharoor of India. On US suggestions that merit is more important than geographical rotation, two non-Asians have been encouraged to run: the presidents of Latvia and Poland. If the US insists on maintaining the role of king-maker, a tough battle with China may ensure. In such a battle situation, the nomination usually goes to a surprise, compromise candidate. In 1996, when the US publicly insisted that it would oppose a second term for Boutros-Ghali as Africa's candidate, it threatened that, if the Africans stalled, it would go outside the African group and come up with another candidate from a different region. When African nations acquiesced, Madeline Albright, then the US permanent representative to the UN who had led the campaign against Boutros-Ghali, came up with the name of Annan -- a polished candidate who had patiently and smoothly climbed up the ladder of the UN bureaucracy for more than three decades. In the semi-final vote in the Security Council, Annan got 14 favourable votes and one objection from a permanent member -- France. The French, masters of diplomacy, wanted to kill two birds with one stone: to make a gesture to Boutros-Ghali that the Francophone is always loyal to its kin, and to show Annan that they, too, can play the role of king-maker. In the second and final vote, France voted in favour and in return got to have a French national fill the post of undersecretary-general for Peacekeeping Operations, which Annan was to vacate. How and for whom the council will vote next week is anyone's guess. If the US and China join hands in picking up a candidate the matter will be settled smoothly, but it may not mean that any one of the visible candidates will be their choice. If they should lock horns, as they did in 1981, it could be a long drawn out battle. In 1981, the US supported the candidacy of outgoing secretary-general Kurt Waldheim for a third term while China strongly backed Tanzania's permanent representative, Salim Ahmed Salim -- a fierce and articulate defender of the developing world -- to fill the post. There were nearly 24 fruitless votes in the Security Council on both candidates, with each of the two veto- wielding powers blocking the other's candidate. The deadlock resulted in the final choice of a compromise candidate -- undersecretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar, who became the fifth secretary-general. It was reported at the time that the US never forgave Salim for wildly celebrating the expulsion in 1972 of Nationalist China from the council's membership and its replacement by the People's Republic of China as the true representative of the Chinese people by performing an African victory dance in the council's alleys. To define the criteria for both the choice and performance of the next secretary-general, a comparison with a running parallel in academia may be pertinent: the selection of a new president for Harvard University. In February, the faculty of Harvard voted a no-confidence resolution in the presidency of Lawrence Summers, former US secretary of the treasury who had originally been a Harvard professor because of his outspoken controversial views. Although he had served only for five years, compared to his two immediate predecessors who had served for 10 and 20 years respectively, Harvard's Board of Directors, known as "the Corporation" asked him to resign. The search is now on for the 28th president of Harvard and the Corporation announced there will be no timeline for the selection, in which case the head-hunting could last for as many as two years or more as was the case in past selections. To be the president of Harvard demands almost superhuman qualities: academic brilliance, vision, political acumen, administrative skills, charm, tact, worldliness, to be able to lead and serve and to know and be right, to name just a few qualities. By comparison, the international community of the United Nations seems to set a much lower common denominator for the selection of the world's chief diplomat or chief administrative officer. In 1952, Dag Hammarskjoeld was almost drafted for the job of secretary-general. In 2006, it will most likely be the power of compromise that will determine the selection. And in a world laden with colossal problems and crises, the new secretary-general will need full independence from the powers that be in order to serve the interests of all, including the most powerful and the most underprivileged. The world of the 21st century now seeks a new singer for an old song.
