United Nations – Page 3 – Josh Philip Ross

October 3, 2006

[ban’s the man]

So it looks like Ban is the man. In today’s final Security Council straw poll to determine who the Security Council will recommend for Secretary-General, Minister Ban Ki-moon of South Korea received only one “Discourage” vote, and received “Encourage” votes from all five permanent members — the only Security Council members with veto power.

So barring either a surprise shift in the Security Council or an even more unlikely rebellion by the General Assembly, which ultimately has the decisionmaking power — technically, the Security Council only recommends candidates, though historically they have recommended just one for an up-or-down vote by the General Assembly — Ban Ki-moon will be the next United Nations Secretary-General.

Update: New York Times says “Korean Virtually Assured of Top Job at U.N.“

September 21, 2006

[women leaders]

Minister Kang Kyung-hwa (강경화 공사님) of the Republic of Korea has been appointed UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Minister Kang was serving here at the Mission when I started, back in 2004. She is an extraordinary woman: intelligent, articulate in both English and Korean, charismatic, passionate about her work. She has been especially focused on pushing through an international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the text of which was agreed this August after five years of negotiations. Ms. Kang’s particular emphasis was on the rights of women with disabilities, and she was able to get a paragraph on the subject included in the final text.

It is presumably in recognition of this work that Minister Kang was appointed Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights. As a pro-Korean feminist, I’m personally pleased to see a powerful Korean woman coming to international prominence. On a global scale, Korea does pretty well by its women — they’re educated, they have lots of professional opportunities, they vote — but for all that, there is still plenty of sexism and inequality. Minister Kang’s career is part of changing that.

I also find her inspiring as a model for Jenny, who is also attractive, intelligent, hardworking and capable. Last night Jenny caught sight of an old classmate, Caolionn O’Connell, in a Nova episode about E=mc², and it got Jenny worrying about whether she’s made the right choices in life or tried hard enough.

I personally think Jenny’s doing just fine. She tends to have degree envy, but unlike science majors, humanities majors who go straight to grad school tend to waste their time there. If Jenny had gone straight into grad school, it would have been to study Provençal poets some more, and that would mean that she couldn’t go get her Ph.D. in something she’s passionate about — Central Asian religious development, say — after she’d built up some solid knowledge about the subject. So I don’t think it was a mistake for Jenny to strike out into the real world after college.

Jenny has never gone in a straight line, but that’s just part of who she is: someone with wide-ranging interests and diverse talents. Still, I can understand her worry. She’s building up a formidable set of skills in her current job — everything from management to programming — but what are they all for? Being good at getting things done is only meaningful if you have something meaningful to get done. And for all the value and importance of good corporate management, and of getting women into the higher echelons of the business world, I agree with Jenny that there has to be more to her life than helping insurance companies be slightly more efficient.

That’s why Minister Kang is an inspiring model. Jenny and I still want to join the Foreign Service in a few years, but even if we don’t, there are other ways for Jenny to follow her passions. New opportunities will arise, interesting doors will open, and Jenny will choose which ones to step through. When she does, she’ll have the necessary skills to be successful. Could Jenny one day be UN Deputy High Commissioner for Something Important? Absolutely. And even though she hasn’t gotten her Ph.D. yet, I think Jenny is doing all the right things to become someone like Minister Kang down the road.

Well, except for being Korean. There are some things even Jenny can’t do.

But fewer than you’d think.

September 16, 2006

[yes, minister]

The office is currently abuzz, with everyone racing around to prepare for the arrival this afternoon of His Excellency Mr. BAN Ki-moon, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Republic of Korea, as we refer to him around these parts (the caps are to prevent a recurrence of the unfortunate recent incident in which a Congolese representative referred to the Minister as “Mr. Moon”).

Minister Ban will be making his longest stay ever in New York, hanging around until the early morning of the 28th. During this extended visit, he will be speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, holding bilateral meetings with as many foreign ministers as he can manage, and otherwise meeting and greeting anyone and everyone who might have some influence over the selection of the next Secretary-General. This dense schedule will no doubt keep the Mission staff ferociously busy during the next week, leaving only us scribes to twiddle our thumbs until the Minister once again heads home.

As for Minister Ban’s bid to become the next Secretary-General, it’s looking good at the moment. In the latest straw poll of the Security Council, Ban came out with 14 “Encourage” votes and just one “Discourage,” putting him at the top of the list. The big question, of course, is whether that “Discourage” came from Japan, which has no veto power, or from either China or the United States, which as permanent members could quash his candidacy. There is always the possibility of a dark-horse candidate, but whatever happens, it looks like the Security Council will vote no later than October.

August 14, 2006

[two years]

The I.M. Pei-designed South Korean Mission on East 45th Street.

I sort of missed it as it went by, but July 27 marked two years for me at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. This is the longest I’ve stayed at any job except for DoubleClick, which lasted three long years.

But it hasn’t seemed that long, presumably because I really enjoy being here. By two years in at DoubleClick, I’d gone through a fairly disastrous opening period and suffered through my boss Karen’s pregnancy leave, during which her second-in-command hewed strictly to her orders that I do no work except editing — which was a problem because there was, during that period, no editing to be done — and then, upon her return, confronted me with threats of imminent dismissal because I hadn’t been doing any work. Things turned around in my last year, when I finally got my own ego in check and learned how to behave decently in an office, while my boss finally worked out how to run a writing department (useful tip: request writing samples from job candidates). I suppose the whole transformative experience of DoubleClick, which was my first serious job out of school, made it seem longer than it was.

In any case, that’s now far in the past. Apparently speechwriters don’t usually last long here at the Mission, so I may be headed for veteran status fairly soon.

August 1, 2006

[blogging the secretary-general]

UNSG.org is an intelligent Canadian blog on the selection process for the next UN Secretary-General. The latest post has some trenchant tea-leaf reading regarding last week’s straw poll. The blogger’s inside sources suggest that the lone “discourage” vote for South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, rather than coming from Japan or China, came from the United States, which may have simply voted “discourage” for all four candidates.

This is made more plausible by US Ambassador John Bolton’s bizarre recent comment describing “the ideal candidate as a proletarian — somebody who will work in the system, who will get his fingernails dirty or her fingernails dirty, and really manage the place, which is what it needs.” I love it when neocons pull out the Communist rhetoric. It makes me feel so deliciously dirty!

Seriously, though, this seems to be an attempt both to discredit the current candidates and to suggest that the new Secretary-General should be an anonymous nobody, to be treated with all the respect neocons generally accord to the proletariat. Or perhaps it’s just part of the Bush administration’s overall contempt for expertise, qualifications or demonstrations of competence — starting, of course, from the decidedly mediocre top man, and extending to people like Paul Bremmer, Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, Harriet Miers, and of course Bolton himself.

July 27, 2006

[where blue helmets come from]

Well, not so much the helmets as the guys under them. Slate has a helpful Explainer on how to become a UN peacekeeper.

Basically, UN member states contribute them, and they mostly come from poor countries because the UN pays them $1,028 per month, which is crap if you’re from the developed world but is quite a lot for major troop-contributing countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (the 2005 monthly per capita income in the latter was $33.58). In such countries, the government typically takes a cut to cover expenses and contribute to the national coffers, while the individual peacekeepers are paid low wages that nevertheless beat what most people can earn back home. A problem with this scheme is that the UN peacekeeper salary is not nearly enough to pay for quality equipment and ammunition, so peacekeepers have been known to arrive on the scene underequipped and hungry, adding to the logistical crisis they’re supposed to be defusing.

July 26, 2006

[the race for secretary-general]

Yesterday the Security Council held an informal straw poll to see where they stand on the various declared candidates for UN Secretary-General — Kofi Annan’s term ends on December 31 of this year — and Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon of South Korea got the most endorsements.

To understand what this means, it might be helpful to back up and explain how the Secretary-General is chosen. According to Article 97 of Chapter XV of the UN Charter, “The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” On the surface, this makes it look like the power resides with the General Assembly, but in reality the Security Council recommends just one candidate, which the General Assembly then approves or not. So it’s the Security Council’s views that matter most.

In the secret-ballot straw poll, each Security Council member could check “encourage,” “discourage” or “no opinion” next to the name of each declared candidate. (The declared candidates are Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, former Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka, and Indian novelist and UN Department of Public Information head Shashi Tharoor.) Minister Ban received 12 “encourage” votes, one “discourage,” and two “no opinions.” Tharoor came in a close second.

So who’s the “discourage,” eh? If I had to guess, I would say Japan, whose attempts to join the Security Council as a permanent member South Korea has vigorously resisted. But who knows?