Quiet Diplomat, Big Microphone
Asked about Ban Ki-moon’s first year as Secretary General, a United Nations staffer recently quipped, “If you want to know what he’s thinking, you’re going to have to go ask the penguins.” Of all the jokes flying around the UN these days, many lobbed by the new Korean head honcho himself, the penguin poke was quite telling. The staffer facetiously referred to Ban’s November trip to Antarctica, billed as the first by a UN Secretary General (a most dubious achievement), to grandstand on what has become his signature cause: global warming. But the crack goes to the heart of the muffled enigma that surrounds Ban: in private he may prevail, but in public he’s painful.
Just before taking office, at the UN Correspondent’s Association dinner, Ban (pronounced Bahn) introduced himself, “My name is Ban. Not James Bond. I am not code-named 007, but I will take office in ’07,” and then proceeded to break into an ill-rehearsed take on a Christmas classic jingle, “Ban Ki-moon is Coming to Town.” A year later, same event, since being called “wooden” by the New York Times’ Warren Hoge, he went at it again. This time, he recited his rewritten version of, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” in which Ban is driving a sleigh and he’s, “now off to Bali, climate change I must fight // Or else Christmas next will be even less white.”
But twelve months into Ban’s tenure, is the joke on us? Ban had kept a considerably low profile throughout the cryptic selection process. The Times invited the candidates to make their case on the paper’s Op-Ed page. Ban didn’t bother. The candidate’s talk at the Council on Foreign Relations left some in the crowd wondering how he’d been nominated. Washington and Beijing, however, embraced the career Korean diplomat, and as permanent members of the Security Council, engineered his successful appointment. When Ban took office, the press called him “faceless,” and reported the mood of the staff as glum. Many believe that Ban’s lack of an agenda and hush-hush demeanor actually propelled him as a top-pick.
Powerful states may be able to install a faceless jester, but once he’s in office, the issues, to put it lightly, are a matter of life and death.
“Ban moved Bashir a little more than a centimeter,” said Jeffrey Laurenti, senior advisor to the UN Foundation and Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, referring to Ban’s closed-door diplomacy with Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, about the ongoing crisis in the western Darfur region of the country. For his most serious negotiations, Ban sends aides out of the room and talks privately. Laurenti was kind, “Give him a B-plus on Darfur.”
That grade may be revised, however, because of Ban’s lacking public performance. The issue? Helicopters. Strangely, suddenly not a single country can spare even a one for the humanitarian mission. Not the U.S., not the U.K., neither France, nor Germany. Back-room brokering may be Ban’s default setting, but that doesn’t get the whole job done. Even woodenly, Ban ought to be shaming these rich and powerful governments, loudly. Ban needs to find his voice, and fast.
“He’s certainly no Kofi Annan,” a thirty-year veteran said off the record. Annan, the former UN Secretary General, employed a commandeering public voice with both his heavy baritone and the weight of his words, often to the consternation of the U.S. Ban, however, takes criticisms personally and interrupts points by describing himself: often as an optimist, or, by regularly asserting, “I am a harmonizer.” Meanwhile, neighboring Darfur, severe human suffering is spiraling toward hell in Chad, Congo, Rwanda, and Somalia, all of which cry out for a moral voice to speak directly into the microphone on the world stage.
As an organization, though, the UN faces a new and unnerving threat. Since the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the spate of murders that killed scores of humanitarian workers in Darfur in 2006, and the recent attack on UN buildings in Algiers that killed 17, the UN has become a target. The sky-blue flag no longer flies with the authority, legitimacy, and impartiality it once did. And to this, there is no simple solution.
UN staffers joke about penguins, but gags aside, they are rightly scared and feel acutely vulnerable. First, Ban ought to ensure that UN security policies are first-rate and fully observed at facilities throughout the world. Second, and just as important, he needs to restore that moral voice to the UN—the one that makes the blue flag a sign of good and the blue helmet a sign of peace. He was given the job to shut up, but if he doesn’t speak up, everybody loses.
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