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Analysis: Rising Moon atop the UN

Council on Foreign Relations

January 5, 2007
Prepared by: Carin Zissis

New UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was known as “slippery eel” by journalists in his native South Korea for avoiding direct answers to difficult questions. But Ban landed himself in hot water on his first day at work over comments during a UN press conference about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s execution last week. Asked whether Saddam should have been hanged, Ban departed from traditional UN opposition to the practice by saying: “The issue of capital punishment is for each and every member state to decide.”

Ban’s spokeswoman said his opinion on the death penalty represented his own interpretations (LAT) rather than the UN’s stance. But despite his initial blunt comments with mass media, the former South Korean foreign minister has called himself a “harmonizer,” prized for his subtle style as he succeeds Kofi A. Annan. CFR Senior Fellow Lee Feinstein says Ban ultimately gained U.S. support during the selection process last fall because the White House “wanted an implementer, not a speechifier.” A new Backgrounder takes a look at the open-ended role of the UN secretary-general.

Century Foundation Senior Fellow Jeffrey Laurenti says the low-key Ban will likely please some conservatives rankled by Annan’s outspokenness. But Laurenti also says Ban may disappoint the Bush administration in other ways, such as his unwillingness to back down on aspects of the Millennium Development Goals set out at a 2000 UN summit. In a September interview with the Asia Society’s Nermeen Shaikh, Ban confirmed support for the UN goal that wealthy nations commit 0.7 percent of their gross national products (GNPs) to development assistance, a figure that both Democratic and Republican administrations have declined to sign on to.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.