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| Towards A Better World | | | K.P. Nayar
It is not easy being secretary-general of the United Nations. A few weeks ago, at the wedding of his India-born son, Ban Ki-moon dispensed with a custom that is integral to wedding ceremonies in Korea: the practice of guests dropping envelopes with money in a basket before congratulating the newly-weds or sitting down for a celebratory meal. The custom had its origin in the practical Korean idea that relatives and friends of newly-weds should enable couples to start their lives together with some collective help and also assist their parents in meeting wedding expenses. But in recent years, the custom had become an occasion to display the wealth, power and influence of the families of new couples, their friends and acquaintances.
Recounting the secretary-general’s decision to have no more than 150 relatives and close friends at a small cathedral in New York, where his son married a 27 year-old Korean Ivy League medical student, a journalist friend from Seoul recalled that the custom, which Ban dispensed with, was so integral to weddings in his country that all 2,000 teachers in a region, who worked under a local education official, recently felt compelled to gift money at the wedding of the official’s son.
Aversion to ostentation and an obsession with transparency have become two of the many hallmarks of this secretary-general’s five-year tenure, which crossed the half-way milestone 10 days ago. In two and a half years, Ban’s style has brought reassurance to the UN, where his predecessor, Kofi Annan, was truly a rock star until impressions of a delinquent administration sadly brought him down in the last years of his final decade in the world body. Those who have known Ban for decades and others who have worked closely with him in the last two and a half years at the UN, are not surprised that in a quiet, almost Confucian style, he has significantly changed the world body from what it has hitherto been.
Although the Cold War ended nearly two decades ago, at the UN they continued to view the world through the same prism, as if little had changed. But it can already be said that when Ban is long gone from the UN, he would have left the legacy of an organization that is no more a mere collection of governments, whose representatives, along with the secretary-general and the president of the general assembly, used it as a bully pulpit to speak out on the great issues of the day.
A typical example is the secretary-general’s personal involvement in the fight against river blindness, which affects approximately 18 million people worldwide, most of them in Africa. It is estimated that 125 million others are susceptible to infection if the challenge it poses is not tackled. The disease, which leads to irreversible blindness, is caused by the parasitic bites of small flies that breed in rivers and streams in the poorest of countries.
Experts estimate that river blindness can be eliminated by a pill that costs $1.50 a year. In May last year, Ban went to the Carter Center — set up by the former American president, Jimmy Carter, in Atlanta — where he gathered global health leaders and a representative of elders, a group of world leaders whose goal is to contribute their wisdom in tackling some of the world’s toughest problems. “We have targeted the neglected diseases of the world’s neglected people,” Ban said at the end of the meeting, “those diseases like guinea worm and river blindness can be eliminated if we only take the time to do so.” Another scourge, the eradication of which Ban is committed to as secretary-general, is malaria. “If we can maintain current levels of progress, by 2015 there could be nearly zero preventable deaths from malaria,” he asserted in April.
It is not as if nothing was being done in these areas by the UN before Ban became secretary-general. But the difference he has made is in engineering new partnerships on a global scale. Ban no longer presides over a body run solely by member governments. On issues vital to the human race, such as health, he has forged a new coalition of states, the private sector, non-profits such as the Gates Foundation as well as UN agencies, which have been reinvigorated, as in the case of malaria, by the appointment of a philanthropist as his special envoy. The results are already showing. Last month, Ban and Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, persuaded the notoriously profit-minded big pharmaceutical companies to donate 10 per cent of their H1N1 or swine flu vaccines to poor countries that cannot afford to buy them.
Ban actually cried when he went to the Democratic Republic of Congo in March and met some of the hundreds of thousands in Goma who had been raped and the millions who had fled their homes to escape violence. His emotional reaction was not surprising for those of his aides who already knew that Ban came to the UN two and a half years ago determined to be the voice of the voiceless and the defender of the defenceless.
His closest friends insist that Ban made up his mind at the age of 12 that he wanted to be secretary-general of the UN. How his mind was made up is the inspiring story of a little boy in war-ravaged Korea who, in his own words, was “hungry, afraid and alone”. “I went to school in the open air,” says Ban, “there were no walls, only rubble. There was not much to eat. Often I went to sleep, crying from hunger. The UN ... helped feed and defend my people. And I was one of them. It helped rebuild my country. Ever after, for me and my country, the UN has been the symbol of hope.”
The world body has never had another secretary-general whose life and outlook have been so completely shaped by the UN. Ban owes his very survival to the organization he now leads. Which is probably why, as it happened at least once recently in a closed room, when Ban yelled at some recalcitrant and intransigent leaders, no one got up and left, but listened to the secretary-general as he carried on until a solution was found, as Michelangelo would chip bits off a block of marble until a statue emerged.
The only foreigner with whom Syria’s president, Bashar al Assad, conducts a conversation in English is Ban. An ophthalmologist, whose presidency is an accident, Assad is fluent in both English and French, but he is so proud of his Arab identity that he refuses to speak to anyone in any language other than in Arabic — except this UN secretary-general.
In his dealings with world leaders, especially those who bring a huge baggage to the UN, Ban has adopted the Confucian approach based on the division of life into stages. At the age of 65, he reckons that he is now in the “age of acceptance”. This is why he is constantly telling his aides that they must have “soft ears”, that they should listen more to others instead of lecturing their interlocutors. In the context of Washington, what a change from the days of George W. Bush, whose prescription for the rest of the world was “my way or the highway”. This willingness to listen is probably what enables Ban to learn languages even in his 60s. When he addressed the World Hindi Conference in New York two years ago, Ban regretted that many words he had learnt at the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi 37 years ago had now become archaic in Hindi.
“C paanch bate chaar (C5/4),” the secretary-general still recalls the number of the house in New Delhi’s Vasant Vihar that he stayed in when he was posted in India in the early 1970s. He even remembers his telephone number in Vasant Vihar. All of this is a plus by way of institutional memory, as Ban tries to change the UN for a better world.
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