David Bosco has an interesting post over at FP riffing on a Reuters piece about Ban Ki-moon’s record at the UN. The Reuters article basically says that most diplomats think that Ban’s OK but that he’s no Kofi Annan. David takes exception:
I’m afraid that this type of invidious comparison is by now part of the accepted institutional history. Kofi Annan was charismatic; Ban is not. Annan had moral authority; Ban doesn’t. You get the idea. I don’t have a particular view on Ban, but I have always thought that Kofi Annan’s vaunted moral authority had a very weak foundation. In fact, I’ll go further–I don’t think he had the moral authority to get the job in the first place.
Why so?
Kofi Annan was the first secretary-general to rise from the ranks of the UN bureaucracy. Before he got the top job, he served as head of UN peacekeeping. As his Nobel Prize biography reports, “he was Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at a time when nearly 70,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed in UN operations around the world.”
The Nobel bio neglects to mention that while he was in that post, two of the most shocking episodes in UN history occurred: the Rwanda genocide and the massacre at Srebrenica. In both cases, UN peacekeeping forces were essentially eyewitnesses to genocide. The greatest portion of the blame, of course, goes to the Security Council member states that authorized weak peacekeeping forces incapable of defending civilians and that balked at bolstering them once the bloodletting started. But it is fair to say that Annan’s office did not cover itself in glory.
For all of Ban Ki-moon’s evident shortcomings, at least he doesn’t have that as part of his record.
You can agree or disagree with this assessment – I concur with David’s basic point that a near-ubiquitous nostalgia for Kofi clouds assessments of Ban’s work. Conversely, if are going to judge every UN leader by the horrors that took place on their watch, should we mention’s Ban’s association with humanitarian mega-crises in the DRC (2008), Sri Lanka (2009) and Darfur (ongoing)? Maybe so. But my main problem with this argument is that I’m wary of the whole moral yardstick thing anyway.
Annan’s strongest qualifications to run the UN were his instinctive sense of the organization’s capabilities and his political ability to charm the Clinton administration – which obviously failed to transfer to the Bush administration. Annan got hold of the UN at a time when it was in well-nigh terminal disarray after the Balkan and Rwandan fiascoes (which, in fairness, he took responsibility for while SG) and used his institutional and political skills to restore its relevance, as the 70K blue helmets attest.
And Ban? I have a piece coming out in Internationale Politik assessing his performance in similar institutional/political terms – but you’ll have to wait until April to read that. Suffice it to say that I think that, after four years in the job, he has still to get the real sense of what the UN can achieve that Annan had. Equally, it’s harder for Ban in 2011 than it was for Annan in 1999 or 2000: Annan worked in a straightforward context of American power. Mr. Ban navigates less well-charted waters.
