The Korea Times
By Lee Han-soo
With UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s term ending this year, British economic weekly magazine, The Economist, has published a special article that claims Ban has been a colossal failure.
The magazine gave Ban credit for proposing new sustainable development goals and for holding the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in December 2015. But the magazine slammed Ban for being ineloquent, tied up in protocols and lacking flexibility.
The weekly also pointed out Ban’s unprofessional mistake of calling Morocco’s presence in the Western Sahara an “occupation” despite his nine-years in the office. His misuse of the word brought a severe backlash from the Moroccan government and, according to experts, provoked the Moroccan government to expel UN staff trying to maintain peace in the Western Sahara.
The magazine said Ban was only elected as UN chief because none of the Security Council’s permanent members the U.S., China, Britain, France and Russia believed he would not be a problem in their spheres of interest.
Although the UN has come a long way since it was founded in 1945 and many international crises could not have been dealt with solely by the secretary general, the weekly pointed out that Ban’s reign had almost no influence on any international matter.
The magazine suggested that whoever replaced Ban, nothing was likely to change at the U.N.
The UN administration has also been a target of criticism. Poorly supervised peacekeeping budgets and the “sclerotic” way of recruiting UN employees that took an average of 213 days were cited in a New York Times interview with Anthony Bandury, an American UN official.
corea022@ktimes.com
