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CIAO DATE: 12/5/2006
Interview with Shashi Tharoor, UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information
Nermeen Shaikh
September 2006
Full Text
September 22, 2006
Shashi Tharoor is the Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information at the UN. Mr Tharoor was the runner up to South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon for Secretary General.
How might your experience as a career UN diplomat work to your advantage in the selection process? And how might it be a disadvantage?
Well it all depends, of course, on how people react to internal experience. I obviously see this as a major asset because I spent 28 years in the United Nations system in a wide variety of activities. I have worked for refugees and humanitarian operations, as well as in peacekeeping at the end of the Cold War; in the Secretary-General's own office, where I've seen his work at close quarters, and then in the management of a rather large department which I have essentially been able to reform.
So I have had experience from the inside and from the ground up of pretty much all the major types of challenges with which a Secretary-General is confronted. Now I think that's a great advantage because it means that I come into the job without having to surmount a learning curve. I can hit the ground running. What's more, I am also somebody who, in every one of my jobs, has shown a capacity for innovation, for creativity and for a willingness to lead change. And that's important; if those who worry about an insider think that this might be a complacent bureaucrat who wants business as usual, that's not me, I wouldn't want such a person either. I do come with a long track record of having actually been able to innovate in every job I've had. So for all of these reasons I think that I'd be the right person to both ensure continuity with the important tasks of the United Nations, and at the same time, to enable us to actually bring about meaningful change in an effective way.
Having said that, there are some clearly who have become so critical of the United Nations as an institution that they would not want somebody from the inside. My own feeling is that this is not a well founded concern. Because in other parts of the UN system, inside experience has actually been seen as an asset. Just a couple of years ago, the Korean government made the very valid point in advocating the candidacy of Dr Lee Jong-wook; that is, 23 years in WHO is precisely what made him qualified to run that organization. And he did a good job before his untimely death this summer. We have seen similar stories in the International Atomic Energy Agency where Mohammed ElBaradei had worked over a dozen years in the organization before being elected to head it against outside candidates. A similar story in UNIDO with Kandeh Yumkella and so on. So there's an increasing consciousness that the complexity of these international organizations can benefit from being tackled by people who know them from the inside, as it were.
James Traub, author of The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power, has argued that "the one thing that the five members of the Security Council have in common is they want to see a secretary general of modest dimensions." Could you comment on this?
Well, that has been suggested in the past, and that wonderful Brian Urquhart, the elder statesman of UN affairs, in comments about a Secretary General who clearly was not like that -- Dag Hammarskjold- said that the reason he was elected is that people assumed he would be an unremarkable civil servant and not the intellectual and moral giant that he turned out to be. Perhaps that's true, I don't know, but I would argue that there are decisionmakers amongst the permanent members of the Council who want to see a strong United Nations. If they were to appoint a cipher, if they were to appoint somebody whose principal characteristic is that he won't make waves, then I'm afraid the result may well be that the boat won't sail very far and that would be a great shame for those for whom the United Nations is an invaluable institution.
Now moving to the most recent session of the General Assembly: Following the impassioned speech by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, the Financial Times wrote that the applause he received, "hammered home the mounting sense of developing world anger at an organization many countries believe to be irretrievably under the sway of rich western powers." You have also pointed out that a North-South divide at the UN may come to replace the East-West divide that existed during the Cold War. How can the UN address this problem?
Well I think this is a very, very serious concern, and I certainly, having devoted most of my adult life to the UN, don't want to see the old East-West of the past being replaced by a North-South divide. My own wish would very much be to approach the problem as, indeed, a son of the South myself, as somebody coming from the G-77 countries, from a developing country, and one with a certain amount of influence in that forum. Somebody who therefore can make a valuable contribution, I hope, to the process of healing that is so necessary. To be able to speak to countries of the South as one of them, to speak for countries of the South within the larger picture, and at the same time to be able to talk the language of the North. I have lived and grown up in many ways and in many countries around the world, including the developed world. And I believe that I can heal this fracture by reaching across to both halves, as it were, of my own experience. I do want to say that it would be calamitous for the organization if these wounds were allowed to persist and fester. The UN needs to be a place where North and South can talk together and can remember that they have a common interest in achieving solutions that reflect their shared humanity.
Many have argued that one way of addressing that problem is to expand the Security Council to include emerging powers like India and Brazil. What do you think of that? And how does your candidacy for Secretary-General affect India's bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council?
It doesn't really because it's a different track all together. The Secretary-General has very little say in whether or not the Security Council is to be expanded; that is entirely a reflection of the political will of member states. There is a very clear formula in the UN Charter for amending it which is what is required to change the Security Council, and that is that you need a two-thirds majority of all the members of the General Assembly and that's got to be ratified, and ratification is usually a parliamentary procedure, so ratified by two-thirds of the parliaments of the world including those of all five permanent members. Now that's a pretty high threshold to be crossed and we do see that the Security Counsel reflects largely the geopolitical realities of 1945, and not of 2006. But it's the sort of malady in which all of the doctors gather around the patient, they all agree on the diagnosis, but they can't agree on the prescription! And until there is agreement on the prescription, until there are these two-thirds that I mentioned to you, then I'm afraid we're not going to have a framework within which the countries you mentioned and others can pursue their aspirations.
So as Secretary General, I personally would not feel it a useful use of my time to try and focus on that issue because ultimately it's not the ideas that a Secretary-General can come up with that matter but rather the politics of the process and what member states as governments are prepared to accept.
There are many who argue that the General Assembly should be invested with greater decisionmaking authority. Are there similar barriers there?
No, the General Assembly has a certain amount of authority already. It's more a question of how that's used; certainly on financial and budgetary matters, it is indeed the General Assembly that decides. On a number of issues, you need a resolution of the General Assembly which of course all countries have an equal vote in. We have seen the General Assembly being used on controversial issues as well. There was a famous "Uniting for Peace" formula in the 1950s when the Security Council was paralyzed on a question that is now a precedent for people turning to the Assembly. So a lot depends on the evolution of political circumstances.
Right now on peace and security questions, the Council prevails and on other matters, particularly economic, social, humanitarian, and if you like, the declaratory aspects of the work, it's the General Assembly. The balance between these two institutions need to be preserved and that's part of our challenge. The countries who are a majority in the General Assembly, namely the countries of the developing world, are anxious to ensure that they aren't completely pushed aside by issues on which the Security Council alone has the sway.
Now let's turn to the question of the Millennium Development Goals, a matter you have given some attention to elsewhere. Given the large and often increasing inequalities both within and between states, what structural or other changes will be necessary in order to successfully achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015?
Well, above all, political will in my view. The fact is that the Millennium Development Goals are actually not just goals, they're commitments. They're promises made by the world leaders who gathered in New York in the year 2000 in what was called the Millennium Summit. And where an impressive array of presidents and prime ministers and kings all said we commit ourselves to solving these problems by 2015. There are measurable targets: reducing poverty by half, tackling HIV/AIDS, improving the education of girls and indeed of others, improving drinking water and sanitation. There are a whole series of very explicit targets which have been committed to by governments and they have been endorsed subsequently, for example, at the development conference in Monterey a couple of years later by all countries. So we're talking about something which we should be holding governments to and that's why political will is so important. No world leader should be allowed to feel that s/he can come and sign on to a commitment and forget about it, especially when we're talking about life and death. So I think part of the job of the United Nations Secretary-General must be to use his or her bully pulpit to hold governments to account effectively on this.
The second thing that I think is extremely important on the Millennium Development Goals is resources. You can't develop without money and I know there are good reasons why many people have been concerned about corruption, or misgovernance or bad policies and all the things that often we hear about in rich countries as justifying not giving more resources, but honestly it's a shame that today with the resources that are available in the world, the technological advances of recent years and the level of awareness that we have, it is truly a shame that there are still children going to bed hungry, half the human population doesn't have enough to eat, does not have assurance of medicine, does not have clean drinking water, does not have the means to surmount the basic things that we need in life before we can even think in terms of fulfilling our human potential. So to me this has to be the equivalent of a crusade, if that's the wrong word I apologize for it, but it's got to be something that we really have to take forward as a means of mobilizing the world very, very seriously towards fulfilling objectives that honestly everyone is supposed to have already agreed to.
Would it be your top priority?
Absolutely, and yet I can't say that the UN alone holds the answers. I mentioned in the past that the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, have very, very important parts to play. Some might argue perhaps even more important. What we can do at the UN is to channel some of the political thinking: we are the one place where all the countries have a voice including all the developing countries, and a voice that's equal in the General Assembly to those of the developed. That is not true in these other institutions. So I think that means that we can help be the place which formulates the political agenda at the international level, to put this forward. And then at the end of the day, to be quite honest, it's up to governments to, first of all ,devise and secondly to execute the right policies.
There are some who argue that the increasing interconnectedness of the world warrants the creation of a global government so that democracy may be organized democratically at a global level. What do you think of that?
I think it's not particularly realistic. I mean I'm very, very happy that people have these wonderful ideals! But I've always believed that to work with the UN credibly you have to be both an idealist and a realist. You have to be an idealist because obviously without ideals, you may as well go off and work for a bank or whatever! I believe that the UN exists to fulfill the ideals of the Charter but you pursue your ideals within the framework of the politically possible; that's where the realism comes in.
So it's a combination of idealism and realism that makes a UN official, a kind of passion and engagement and indeed a willingness to see results. Having said that, it's also true, Nermeen, that there are people who would like even more and I don't want to discourage anyone from pursuing their ideals outside the UN. The UN is, however, an organization of sovereign member states. Not one of whom is prepared to give up its sovereignty to a world government, it is simply not a realistic issue on our agenda.
Do you believe that the UN may be at risk of becoming irrelevant as member states often disregard its decisions with impunity and humanitarian disasters such as the one unfolding in Darfur, are often beyond its reach?
Speaking of irrelevance is likely preposterous because of course then the question is: what exactly is relevant? Or who exactly is relevant? If the question essentially implies that we cannot solve all the problems in the world, I would be the first to agree. In fact the world is full of problems that we try to tackle, sometimes more effectively than others. Sometimes we cannot change some of the harsh realities within which human beings live. But as our great second Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold so eloquently put it, "The United Nations was not created to take mankind to paradise. But rather to save humanity from hell." Sometimes the best we can do is prevent things from getting worse, sometimes we can do more. I'm proud of the long record of successes in the UN that have meant that we've won Nobel Prizes for our efforts for many of our agencies, for our peacekeepers and for the secretaries-general themselves. There has been a great deal therefore that the UN can point to with pride. But yes, in many situations, there are combinations of political and intractable local problems that mean that a UN intervention is either not possible, or if it occurs, is not effective. That doesn't meant we shouldn't try and we will keep trying time after time.
So could you identify what you think the main problems will be that the United Nations confronts in the next ten years?
The first problem is of course the unpredictable problem, the problem that you and I can't sit here today and imagine just as three months ago Kofi Annan could not have imagined that he would be spending the bulk of his late summer dealing with the Middle East and Lebanon. That is simply the nature of the job. Unpredictability is the currency of daily life at the United Nations. But secondly, if one were to look at the broad range of issues, it seems to me that one of the great challenges for the United Nations is what we tend to call the "problems without passports". The ones that emerge through the cracks and the façade of the international system and that no one country or group of countries however rich or however powerful can solve on their own. And by those, I mean of course problems like terrorism, but also climate change, drug trafficking, human trafficking and migration, also refugee movements, human rights issues, pandemic disease. All these are things that just cross over frontiers and for which solutions must also be found that transcend frontiers. And that I think is what the UN is absolutely the perfect body to respond to, because we pull together all the countries in the world, and we pull together the wide variety of agencies that actually have the opportunity, the mandate and in some cases, the resources as well as the expertise to tackle these problems. Readying the UN for that is going to be the most important responsibility of the next Secretary-General.
Thank you very much Mr. Tharoor. That concludes the interview, I wish you the best of luck.
I appreciate it, thanks so much.
Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource.
