Annan's Legacy is Moon's Main Challenge

By Max Kapustin

On January 1, 2007, Ban Ki-moon will succeed Kofi Annan as the Secretary General of the United Nations, marking the first time a South Korean has assumed the role. Ban, currently the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea, will arrive at a difficult time for the UN. The role of the Secretary General, and by implication the world body itself, has recently come under fire over accusations of corruption and inefficacy. Ban will have the difficult job of restoring the UN’s relevance, repairing its tattered image, and confronting its most difficult challenges in decades: terrorism, AIDS, and North Korea.

The Secretary General is the head of the UN Secretariat, the body tasked with carrying out the agendas of the UN General Assembly, Security Council, and Economic and Social Council. Secretaries-General serve renewable 5-year terms, with precedent having capped the maximum number of terms at two. Nominations and voting take place in the Security Council; the winning candidate is forwarded to the General Assembly for confirmation. The most recent election consisted of four rounds of straw polls among the Council’s 15 members, with permanent members holding veto power over any candidate. Ban emerged victorious after the final straw poll found him to be the only candidate with the support of all five permanent members.

Nearing the conclusion of his ten years as Secretary General, Kofi Annan is among the office’s most popular and polarizing occupants. Inheriting the collective guilt over inaction during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 from his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Annan has grappled with similar crises during his tenure. The most recent, still unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan, chillingly echoes the slaughter in Rwanda and the UN’s insufficient response. Both cases represent the UN’s failure to adapt its founding principles of being a peace broker between nations to handling violent, sectarian conflicts. Similar criticism haunts the UN’s peacekeeping efforts. Missions in Kosovo and Lebanon draw sharp criticism for not doing enough to stop regional militias and terrorist groups from carrying on armed conflict. Still, Annan remains one of the world’s most respected diplomats, engendering praise from leaders in the developed and developing world for his commitment to and passion for the UN’s mission.

One lasting negative impression Annan leaves behind on the office of the Secretary General stems from the scandal surrounding the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. Controversy stemmed from allegations that Annan’s son, Kojo, received payments from a Swiss company, Cotecna Inspection SA, which was awarded a major contract by the UN program. Although Annan was cleared of any wrongdoing, the scandal cast a pall on the Secretariat as accusations of corruption and kickbacks along divisive political lines continued to swirl. The committee investigating Oil-for-Food recommended an overhaul of the UN’s management structure and oversight, a reform Annan carried forward, along with other changes to the swelling UN bureaucracy, in a March 2006 proposal whose implementation is ongoing.

Ban’s mission, in addition to continuing internal reforms and smoothing political rifts exposed during the run-up to the Iraq war, will involve containing a crisis intimately familiar to him: North Korea. The DPRK’s recent test of a nuclear weapon threatens to increase the strain on relations between the UN’s member states, particularly the permanent Security Council nations. In 1992, Ban served as Vice Chairman of the South-North Joint Nuclear Control Commission, and has since been involved in the six-party talks between the DPRK, China, South Korea, and the US. The experience in dealing with North Korea that Ban brings to the Secretariat could not come at a better time. As a new chapter in the UN’s history is about to be written, Ban stands poised to lead from a position of modesty as he guides the organization through increasingly trying times.