As Colum Lynch notes, Ban Ki-moon has been showered with “glowing plaudits” since he won a second term as UN Secretary-General last week. In a short memo to Ban published yesterday, Bruce Jones and I offer our own (slightly qualified) praise:
Dear Secretary-General,
Congratulations. You have not only won a second five-year term at the United Nations, but you also won with a minimum of fuss. In a month in which the Security Council has been rocked by disputes over Syria, all fifteen members backed you. Last week, the General Assembly gave you unanimous support.
You’ve had a lot of critics since you took office in 2007. They’ve called you a poor manager and an uninspiring public figure. Some will doubtless grumble that your success this month reflected your capacity to avoid controversies with all the major powers. But politics is politics and a win is a win. You have also taken a courageous and consistent stance in favor of the Arab Spring, belying your reputation for caution.
OK, that’s not exactly “whoop whoop, go Ban, yippe-aye-yea!” But as Bruce and I go on to point out, Ban has no time to rest on his laurels:
The top three immediate concerns are Libya, the wider Middle East and Sudan. If you fumble on any one of these, you’ll risk being written off as a lame-duck Secretary-General rather fast:
• Libya: the anti-Gaddafi coalition has asked you to plan for post-conflict recovery, and this is already underway. There’s a high chance that you’ll end up having to manage a very messy post-conflict situation, and while nobody wants to turn Libya into another Kosovo a fairly hefty peacekeeping force could be required to restore order. There are good models out there – think of the way the U.N. responded in southern Lebanon in summer 2006, mobilizing a serious force within a week. At a minimum, the U.N. may have to deploy a sizeable civilian political mission to oversee a transition to democracy as it did in Afghanistan. The U.N. is short of good Arabists and deep expertise on Libya. You’ll need to invest personally in ensuring that the U.N. deploys a credible mission.
• The wider Middle East: beyond Libya, there’s potentially huge demand for the U.N.’s services in mediation, electoral assistance and constitutional reforms across the wider Middle East. Six months from now there could be U.N. assistance missions in Yemen and Syria as well as Libya. But again the lack of qualified U.N. personnel is a problem. In most Arab countries, U.N. development officials worked hand-in-glove with the pre-revolutionary regimes. The sheer speed with which events are unfolding in the region is also difficult for the U.N. bureaucracy to keep up with (although it’s hardly unique in that). You need to think about restructuring the organization’s presence across the Middle East and North Africa, possibly under some sort of regional presence or a super-envoy mandated with ensuring that the U.N. can respond fast to requests for assistance.
• Sudan: at the start of the year, the U.N. oversaw a successful independence referendum in South Sudan, which will achieve statehood in July. But violence on the border between North and South Sudan has intensified, the North has launched a separate and vicious campaign against rebels in the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan’s infrastructure is in an appalling state. You can take a good chunk of the credit for the successful referendum. But you must now take responsibility for ensuring that the new South Sudanese state gets effective governance assistance and that U.N. troops are sufficiently well-armed to deter further violent flare-ups. It’s pretty hard to explain why the international community is spending almost $1,000,000,000 maintaining troops in Sudan if they can’t respond to even small flare-ups, let alone forestall another major round of violence. Sudan is also a test case for your proposed reforms on civilian staffing – seeing those implemented will require you to personally back your chosen SRSG in taking a creative, flexible approach. You can and should challenge the member states to support you on this.
Ban has lots of other issues to tackle over the next three years (climate change, the MDGs, food scarcity, you name it) but he needs to get a grip on these immediate crises if he is to have the credibility to tackle other problems.
