The Best Intentions

"This is written by Jim Traub, who is a New York Times reporter and feature writer. And he had done a profile of Kofi Annan quite early in his term of office, and was obviously interested in him as a person. And then he thought, people will be interested when Kofi completes his term in some sort of insider’s account of what it was like. And so he essentially negotiated a deal with Kofi Annan, whereby he was kind of embedded in the Secretary-General’s office. Again, it’s quite a good read. Of course I was one of the people that he interviewed, although for some reason he describes me as having a stammer, which I don’t think anybody else ever has, maybe I was intimidated by him to the point of stammering…but otherwise he’s quite nice about me in the book, and generally he’s nice about quite a few people around Kofi Annan, and mostly about Kofi himself. Although there are places where he seems to be suggesting that Kofi Annan is a bit of a cold fish and not really deeply affected by some of the tragedies he was involved in, like Rwanda, which I think is probably unfair. I think he mistook the natural reserve and dignity of the man for a lack of feeling. Well that’s very high praise. I’m not the best person to make the judgment, because obviously if you’re one of the characters in the story you’re going to be turning the pages quite eagerly. I would say that for me Brian Urquhart’s book is a page-turner, and Samantha Power’s book too. So perhaps it’s not quite as much of an oxymoron as people think. It is true that it is hard, and a lot of the things you have to explain about the UN are in the classic category of things that make people’s eyes glaze over. I think that’s one half of it. The other half is that the rest of the world or much of it, thinks that the UN doesn’t stand up to the US nearly enough, that it essentially serves more to ratify and legitimize the very unequal distribution of power in the world, than it does to correct it. And certainly that is the big challenge for every Secretary-General – he wants to be seen as a champion of the small, the oppressed, the weak, the poor, the great masses of the world. But he knows that in order to achieve anything he has to work with the very powerful and of course in these times, and throughout the history of the UN, that has always included whoever is in power in Washington. And you’re all the time having to explain to the one, why the other’s view matters. And you do indeed find a lot of Americans who basically can’t see the point of the UN if it’s not directly agreeing with or supporting whatever America thinks should be done at any given time. Then there are a very large number of people elsewhere in the world, who say: “Well what’s the point of having the UN if it doesn’t stand up to the US?” And in my job, as Director of Communications, I found I was endlessly having to try to explain to each of those parties why we couldn’t ignore the other. By the standards of bureaucracies, if you compare it to the US federal government, it’s tiny, I think it’s tiny even compared to the New York Fire Department. Now whether all the people working there are doing a useful job is a perfectly fair question and should be asked. But it’s not actually an enormous bureaucracy. I think it does, and I think it always will. I think one of the clichés that Kofi Annan used to use from time to time is that “reform is a process, not an event”. But I also think that a lot of people who go on about UN reform are not really interested in that. The real problems are much more political than they are administrative."