Even as much of the world bridled at the U.S. pretensions of \u201cunipolar\u201d power, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toed Washington\u2019s line and further undercut the U.N.\u2019s supposed evenhandedness, writes Joe Lauria.<\/p>\n
Middle East Online<\/p>\n
After ten years of almost total obedience to Washington, Ban Ki-moon stepped down Sunday as United Nations Secretary-General, leaving behind a sorry legacy that has undermined the U.N.\u2019s legitimacy, which rests on its real and perceived neutrality in overseeing world affairs.<\/p>\n
The U.N.\u2019s second secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold defined the job\u2019s role as a diplomat who has the ability and courage to navigate a course independent of the major powers and in defense of the world\u2019s population.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe right of the Secretariat to full independence, as laid down in the Charter, is an inalienable right,\u201d Hammarskjold said shortly after his election in 1953. The U.N.\u2019s purpose, he said, was not to submit to the major powers but to seek \u201csolutions which approach the common interest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite his elite background, his defense of the \u201ccommon interest\u201d distinguished Hammarskjold and alarmed many of the world\u2019s elites who wanted a more pliable secretary-general who would reliably take their side, especially in management of the Third World. After only one year in office, he condemned the U.S.-led coup in Guatemala that overthrew a democratically elected president. No secretary-general since has publicly criticized a CIA covert operation.<\/p>\n
Hammarskjold\u2019s championing of the common interest of Africans and other colonized people put him at odds with the white rulers of apartheid South Africa as well as colonial Britain and the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe discretion and impartiality required of the Secretary-General may not degenerate into a policy of expedience,\u201d Hammarskjold responded.<\/p>\n
When he also angered the Soviet Union, which demanded his resignation, he responded: \u201cIt is very easy to resign. It is not so easy to stay on. It is very easy to bow to the wishes of a Big Power. It is another matter to resist.\u201d<\/p>\n
By navigating an independent course amid the major powers, Hammarskjold set the standard for the job of secretary-general \u2013 and, as I reported in 2014, it may have led to his death in a mysterious plane crash on Sept. 18, 1961, during a conflict over mineral-rich Congo.<\/p>\n
Bending to Power<\/p>\n
No other Secretary-General has come close to Hammarskjold\u2019s independence or his inventiveness in creative peacekeeping and personal mediation. The few others who tried to follow in his footsteps also found their U.N. careers cut short. For instance, Boutros Boutros-Ghali\u2019s insubordination to Washington in defending developing countries in the face of America\u2019s post-Cold War, unilateralist expansion into spaces vacated by the Soviet Union cost him a second term. He had the temerity to tell Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., that Washington was his \u201cproblem.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cComing from a developing country,\u201d Boutros-Ghali wrote in his memoir, \u201cI was trained extensively in international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need of diplomacy. Neither does the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others learned their lesson. Boutros-Ghali\u2019s successor, Kofi Annan, the only sub-Saharan secretary-general, was a major proponent of U.S. initiatives, including the controversial \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d doctrine of military intervention (as applied in Kosovo) and a U.N. partnership with private corporations, the so-called Global Compact, ultimately giving U.N. cover for neoliberal and multi-national misdeeds.<\/p>\n
Though a darling of Washington, Annan got himself into hot water when he admitted to an insistent BBC interviewer that the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was \u201cillegal.\u201d The Bush administration made the remainder of his second term miserable and tried to pin the Oil-for-Food scandal on him, though it was a program run by the Security Council.<\/p>\n
By contrast, Ban, a South Korean, was seen by the Americans as their man from the start. We \u201cgot exactly what we asked for,\u201d an administrator and not an activist, said John Bolton, America\u2019s irascible U.N. ambassador when Ban was elected in 2005. The U.N. charter doesn\u2019t call the secretary-general \u201cpresident of the world\u201d or \u201cchief poet and visionary,\u201d Bolton said sarcastically in an interview with me and a colleague for The Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n
Ban said his \u201cbiggest blunder\u201d until then had been in 2001 when, as South Korea\u2019s chairman of its nuclear test-ban treaty organization, he wrote a letter in favor of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty just a few months after George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the treaty. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung issued a public apology and fired Ban for his impertinence. It was the act of a vassal state and marked Ban\u2019s evolution into a servile diplomat.<\/p>\n
State Department Advisers<\/p>\n
Once Ban was installed at the U.N. in 2007, he broke with tradition by naming Americans \u2014 two former State Department diplomats \u2014 to be his chief political officers during his ten-year tenure. They brought with them a State Department perspective to the most politically influential job in the organization.<\/p>\n
Ban carefully toed the U.S. line in his public pronouncements. Though he privately fumed over the Saudi military bombardment in Yemen and Riyadh\u2019s haughty dealings with the U.N., he dared not blame America\u2019s ally.<\/p>\n
Likewise, on occasions when Ban sharply criticized Israel for its bombardment of U.N. schools in Gaza, killing scores of innocent people, he spoke only after the State Department had made the same criticism, almost word for word.<\/p>\n
When the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed U.S. mass surveillance of people all over the world, Ban condemned Snowden rather than defend the common interest of the world\u2019s population to be protected from the U.S. intelligence community\u2019s pervasive violations of their privacy.<\/p>\n
Regarding the geo-strategic battle of our times \u2014 America\u2019s unilateral push for global hegemony versus an emerging multi-polar world, led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa \u2014 the U.N. as the world\u2019s premier multilateral organization would have seemed like a natural ally of the BRICS, which held its first formal summit in 2006 just months before Ban took office. But Ban backed the U.S. in every geo-strategic question against Russia and China during his time in office.<\/p>\n
On Syria, Ukraine and the South China Sea, Ban parroted Washington\u2019s rhetoric and made no effort to mediate the disputes. He never condemned the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev or Washington\u2019s support for violent extremists in Syria, which Russia has confronted. He called for regime change in Damascus (after Obama did.)<\/p>\n
Regarding sensitive concerns about Western interference in Africa, Ban failed to distinguish himself on a single African issue, merely endorsing whatever the U.S., Britain and France were up to on the continent. Ban was a prominent champion in the struggle to combat climate change, but it was a position fully endorsed by the Obama administration.<\/p>\n
The new secretary-general, Antonio Guterres of Portugal, is inheriting crises that bedeviled Ban. Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister and head of the U.N.\u2019s refugee agency, whom I interviewed a couple of years ago for an hour without any handlers present, is smart, realistic and outspoken in favor of multilateralism. It won\u2019t be long before it\u2019s known if he will cross swords with the Trump administration, in the tradition of Hammarskjold, or go the way of Ban and let Washington always get its way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Even as much of the world bridled at the U.S. pretensions of \u201cunipolar\u201d power, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toed Washington\u2019s line and further undercut the U.N.\u2019s supposed evenhandedness, writes Joe Lauria. Middle East Online After ten years of almost total obedience to Washington, Ban Ki-moon stepped down Sunday as United Nations Secretary-General, leaving behind …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[6507],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7089\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}