by Alex Evans | Jan 9, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Influence and networks, London Summit, UK
While everyone else is amusing themselves speculating about Obama’s picks for his Cabinet, here in New York everyone’s focused on a different question: what it all means for senior posts in multilateral agencies.
Start with the one thing we know for sure (as of yesterday): Kemal Dervis is leaving his post at the helm of the UN Development Programme, citing personal and family reasons. By and large most people think this really is why he’s leaving (his family is based in DC, so an NY-based job probably isn’t much fun). But at the same time, it also hasn’t escaped notice that Dervis might also be well placed to win another senior multilateral post, should one open up. He’s an intellectual heavyweight, not least on global governance reform (at a time when the G20’s evolving role makes that especially topical) – and he has impeccable economic credentials too.
So is another multilateral post likely to open up? With Strauss Kahn now clearly out of the woods at the IMF, speculation is revolving around two posts in particular: UN Deputy Secretary-General, and World Bank President.
The DSG post is currently held by Asha-Rose Migiro of Tanzania, the third holder of the post since it was instituted in 1997. Theoretically the DSG is supposed to have a key role in bringing coherence to the UN’s development activities, but in practice the current postholder is generally regarded as having underwhelmed. With everyone wondering just how robust Obama’s commitment to multilateralism will prove to be in office, some are speculating that this would be a good moment for Ban Ki-moon to shake up his top team – and with Migiro’s post soon due up for renewal anyway, a new face in the DSG’s office might be just the ticket.
Bob Zoellick, meanwhile, has been terrific for the World Bank. He’s been outstanding on the food price crisis (not least thanks to his alliance with WFP head Josette Sheeran, another former State Dept minister under Condi Rice), incredibly thoughtful on multilateral reform and he has brought calm to the institution after all of the Wolfowitz shock therapy. So why might he leave?
In a nutshell, because of the new Administration. To be sure, Zoellick is greatly respected by Republicans and Democrats alike; and there’s no precedent that a World Bank President (to date, always an American, though this convention may be crumbling) must leave when an Administration of a different political stripe arrives. But another precedent, one that may worry Zoellick, is that a World Bank President in such a situation can find himself eclipsed to some degree by the arrival of a new and powerful US Executive Director on the Board. There’s no sign of any whispering campaign against Zoellick – but he may decide that it’s a good time to move on anyway.
Kemal Dervis would be a credible candidate for either of these positions, of course – so who knows, perhaps some of this analysis features in his thinking. But there’s another angle to the story too: the UK dimension. From a British perspective, the departure of the UNDP Administrator and potentially of the DSG as well must have people at the Foreign Office and DFID thinking hard.
Historically, the UK has always had two USG posts at the UN. Until Mark Malloch Brown moved over to the SG’s office (first as chief of staff, and then as DSG), the two Brit posts were at the top jobs at UNDP and at the UN Department of Political Affairs. But when Mark became DSG, muttering about British over-representation started to be heard – and so the Foreign Office allowed an American to become head of DPA when Kieran Prendergast retired.
Today, the UK is more modestly represented. It still has two USGs, yes – John Holmes at OCHA and David Veness at Safety and Security. But these posts are rather more junior than DSG or DPA – and in any case, David Veness is leaving. (He resigned over the bombing of UN offices in Algeria – a deeply honourable action, taken simply on the basis that it happened on his watch, when in fact there’s universal agreement in the UN that Veness has been a truly outstanding head of security, who has delivered a quantum leap in the quality of UN security around the world. Ban Ki-moon was crazy to accept Veness’s resignation, but there it is.)
So with a vacancy open at UNDP, and another potentially opening up in the DSG’s office, the question in London must be wheter this is a chance to make up lost ground. Lists of senior Brits with international development experience are doubtless being compiled even now…
by Charlie Edwards | Dec 8, 2008 | Conflict and security
The shooting of a teenager by police has sparked a wave of violent protests across Greece. In the past couple of days hundreds of hooded and helmeted protesters have poured into the centre of Athens, hurling petrol bombs and stones at shopfronts, banks, parked cars and police.
According to media reports the trouble began when a number of young people sitting at outdoor cafés in the centre of Athens hurled insults at a passing patrol car. After a verbal exchange between the police and the youths one of the policemen drew his weapon and fired three times, once towards the ground and twice in the air, one of the shots killed Andreas Grigoropoulos. Two policemen have been arrested over the killing and the officer who fired the fatal shot has been charged with manslaughter.
The majority of protests seem to have been led by Anarchist groups which continue to plague Greece. According to CSM, anarchist groups frequently set off small bombs throughout the city – last week a bomb damaged the offices of the French news service Agence France Presse and arsonists torched a Bosnian embassy car and a bank cash machine. But there is a limit to what the police can do. Years of heavy handedness against such groups have created mistrust between the public and the police – and public sentiment seems to favour the anarchists – given this situation was created by the police they are going to have to tred very carefully.
by Mark Weston | Dec 5, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security
Somalia’s piracy is not just good news for the pirates themselves. Whole industries are springing up or expanding to take advantage of the bonanza.
In the town of Eyl, the pirates’ main base, where hundreds of foreign hostages are being held, new restaurants have opened to serve non-Somali food to the captives. Money changers, property developers and Land Rover dealers are doing a roaring trade as the pirates seek to invest their cash. And firms elsewhere in Africa and in the Middle East have spotted an opportunity for a quick buck by helping out with the payment system. Pirates want hard cash, not bank transfers, because getting the money from banks is slow and well-connected warlords can plunder it. So the ransoms have to be taken directly to the ships. This, however, increases the cost and the danger. As a security expert interviewed by the Sunday Times explains: “There have been attacks by other pirates on the way in [to deliver the ransom].” Air drop, he says, is safer, and “there are firms doing it out of Dubai and Mombasa.”
Smaller businesses are thriving too. Selling $3 cups of tea on credit to pirates before they brave the high seas is making life a little easier for a young mother in Eyl. Her clients pay her when they receive the ransoms. “If it wasn’t for them,” she told a Reuters reporter, “I wouldn’t be able to make a living.”
by Alex Evans | Nov 26, 2008 | Global system, Off topic
Bloomberg has a major exclusive:
Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) — The deal to rescue the world’s best- known bank was pieced together by regulators over Domino’s pizza in near-empty offices one block from the White House …
In the middle of the meeting, Paulson called Bernanke, telling him that he and FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, whose agency guarantees bank deposits and some debt, were still negotiating details, according to the person. Meanwhile, about 20 staffers were working at FDIC offices a block from the White House, subsisting on Domino’s pizza for dinner at around 8 p.m. and working on the deal until about 11:30 p.m., according to a person familiar with the matter.
Eh? The biggest bank failure yet, and we’re focusing on the food they orderered?
But wait – isn’t this all slightly familiar? Rewind back to the start of October, when UK officials were putting together the rescue package for Britain’s high street banks. Here’s the Guardian at the time on the key points of the deal:
In the Treasury war room overlooking St James’s Park, central London, his chancellor, Alistair Darling, was thrashing out the details of the bail-out with ministers, lawyers and executives from the eight leading banks …
Anticipating the long and tense night ahead for him and his team, Darling had taken matters in hand at 8.30pm, personally ringing one of his favourite restaurants, Gandhi’s in Kennington, south London, to order £245 worth of rice, karahi lamb, tandoori chicken, vegetable curry and aloo gobi.
What is it with this obsession over what officials or liquidators were munching (and what time they placed the order) as they put together bailout packages late at night? Well, Lucy Kellaway is on hand to explain:
Newspaper articles in these tumultuous, fatal, not-seen-since-the-Great-Depression times are so tightly packed with cliché it is hard to do anything other than join in.
To get the tone right, one needs to use clichés of four different sorts. First is the geological seam of seismic shifts, landscapes, earthquakes and meltdowns. Second is the newer, more vicious, medical imagery of injected, sharp, toxic, pumped, fatal and reeling. Third is the cliché of banal detail: what time it is, what people are eating, what their complexions look like (but only if pale) followed by another look at the clock. The only mundane cliché not to have been seen once in the last six weeks is “smoke-filled rooms” as that is now illegal. The fourth sort of cliché is to declare everything the worst since 1929 or the worst in living memory.
So there you are. Sounds like an excellent excuse for a new version of Meeting Bingo…
by Richard Gowan | Nov 25, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Global system, Off topic
Like the UN didn’t have enough problems already… After Darfur and Congo, the blue helmets have to take on Jack Bauer. The two-hour prequel to the new series of 24, aired in the U.S. last weekend, appears to have been scripted by John Bolton:
JACK Bauer sustains the usual bumps and bruises in the long-awaited two-hour “24” movie on Fox, but it’s the United Nations that really takes it on the chin.
The producers of “24” evidently have zero respect for the UN. To hammer the point home, their two-hour movie – “24: Redemption,” premiering Sunday, Nov. 23 – includes a representative of a UN “peace-keeping” force who just might be the most spineless, loathsome character ever created for this show.
First, this weasel refuses to believe urgent, eyewitness accounts that heavily armed rebels in the fictional African country of Sangala are sweeping the countryside kidnapping schoolboys and forcing them to become soldiers in the rebel army.
Then, when some of the rebels come rolling up to the rural school where Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) has been helping a former Special Forces colleague (Robert Carlyle) work with orphans, the UN guy (played by Sean Cameron Michael) declares that he’ll pacify the rebels simply by chatting with them.
After catching a glimpse of them, however, he immediately runs to join the children in an underground shelter, leaving Jack to fend off the rebel group all by himself. As if that wasn’t cowardly enough, he later decides to save his own skin by telling the rebels where Jack and the children are hiding.
The producers took pains to make the UN rep look as foolish as possible, even though the impotence of the UN is not even a major plot point in this movie, whose real purpose is to set up the seventh season of “24,” scheduled to start, at long last, in January.
I’d quite like to see a version of “24” accurately depicting the UN’s impotence: tremble as Jack Bauer attempts to get a code cable agreed by all parties, and fails. Thrill as there is a dispute over whether Mr. Bauer can take non-insured personnel in a UN 4×4. Gasp as he has holds a multi-stakeholder workshop with the World Bank and European Commission…
