JUST WHAT DOES THE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL DO ? AND HOW DOES HE DO IT?

Kishore Mandhyan

JUST WHAT DOES THE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL DO ? AND HOW DOES HE DO IT?

It has taken a Bombayite, a former Political Director in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to explain the intricate, highly nuanced workings of the world body.

Mr. Kishore Mandhyan, who worked over the last five years in the above post, revealed all at the last meeting when he gave an interesting talk on “The view from the 38th floor of the United Nations: A day in the life of the UN Secretary-General”.

PP Haresh Jagtiani revealed while introducing him that he had rubbed shoulders with several Heads of State, including Barrack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and many others.

He had lectured at Harvard University and at Boston College and had received several accolades, including Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Tufts Global Institute and the University of Bombay.

Mr. Mandhyan said that in the course of his talk he would make an attempt to offer a snapshot of what occurred on the 38th floor of the UN (where the offices of the Secretary

General were located), the context within which it occurred, the content of the occurrences and some of the key challenges faced by the office.

Starting with the context within which the Secretary-General functioned, he pointed out that contrary to popular belief, international institutions for co-operation between States (such as the United Nations) had existed for a very long time and were not recent phenomena. In ancient Greece, the contest between Athens and Sparta, the Hellenic leagues and the Peloponnesian leagues, had managed the bilateral relations between the city-states.

These efforts were not very well developed, not very mature and rather primitive in form, but there was, nonetheless, the genesis of co-operation among States.

If one fast-forwarded to 1815, just after the Napoleonic wars, there was the establishment of the Concert of Europe which was an informal mechanism for consultation amongst European States of the time, to set the rules of the game, to engage and to reduce the outcomes of war which they had experienced for 25 years between 1789 and 1815 after the deposition of the monarchy in France. This was a big change in the area of co-operation.

And then, for almost 100 years between 1815 and 1914 when the First World War broke out, it was a period of relative stability during which many technical international institutions emerged, such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and so on.

These were now taken for granted, but it was almost impossible to imagine in today’s world that a letter posted in one part of the world reached another remote part safe, secure, unopened and within a certain time period. These norms and conventions were established by the ITU, the UPU and so on and formed the foundation for the setting up of the new internet and social networks regimes that were popular today. Similar institutions also helped identify and allocate “corridors” to international civil aviation organisations.

But, Mr. Mandhyan said, that order collapsed in 1914. There emerged the League of Nations which could be called the second generation of formal international institutions. It was a universal, general-purpose organisation. Along with it came the International Labour Organisation. That was a period of revolution in the former Soviet Union and the effort was to get labour management and the States together in creating a particular kind of order.

The League of Nations didn’t last very long, because the Second World War was just round the corner and so was the period of economic depression.

But out of the ashes of the Second World War, the allied powers established the United Nations, the third generation of international organisations. But they had learnt the lesson that it was not only political but economic engagement that mattered. The UN emerged as the political arm of international co-operation.

Coming up around the same time were the Breton Woods Institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank which were the economic dimensions of international economic governance.

It was this institution, the United Nations, that the Secretary-General managed. Essentially, these institutions were State-centric; but although they were driven by States’ interests, they were regulated by the United Nations Charter.

The UN Charter was founded during an idealistic period. Its preamble started with the words, “We the people of the United Nations wanting to save the succeeding generations from the scourge of war and to promote human rights andeconomic development…”

Clearly, it was an idealistic Charter, based upon co-operation among States and the Secretary-General only attempted to facilitate that co-operation. That was the core of his work.

Taking up the functional geography of the organisation, Mr. Mandhyan said that in reality there was more than one UN; there were three UNs, like parallel universes.

The first and foremost was the core UN which consisted of the principal legislative organs, viz., the Security Council and the General Assembly. While the Security Council functioned “like some form of Senate with the powerful nations ensconced in it”, in the General Assembly the principle of equality was well established, where one nation had one vote. The other organs, the economic and social councils, dealt with socio-economic issues. The International Court of Justice in The Hague dealt with judicial issues.

The UN Secretariat tried to implement the decisions of the principal organs and the work of the Secretary-General was to see that the different organs co-operated and supported the programmes emerging from the mandates given by them.

The UN had 193 member States; therefore, the Secretariat was composed of people from those States. Just as India had 30 States and a civil service composed of people from the 30 States with different political and administrative cultures, the UN also had 193 different political and administrative cultures. The challenge was to weave them into one homogenous organisational culture.

Moving on, Mr. Mandhyan said that within the UN system there were many self-governing institutions linked only by a formal mandate; in reality, however, they were almost independent, thus giving rise to a confederation of funds, programmes and agencies.

For example, the World Health Organisation, the IMF and the World Bank had their own governing structure and yet were supposed to be coordinated by the Secretary-General. These were the UN Children’s Fund and the UN Development Programme which handled development issues different from those dealt with by the World Bank.

There was also the UN Environmental Programme based in Nairobi which handled environment-related development issues; the UN High Commission for Refugees in Geneva which dealt with refugee displacement issues; the Human Rights Commission overseeing human rights issues; and so on.Each one of these elements in the UN system tried to assert itself, although the Secretary-General attempted to engage them through a complex process.

Although they functioned under the overall ambit of the General Assembly, it was a challenge for the Secretary-General to coordinate their activities.

In addition to the above, there was an additional “adjunct” player, which comprised the permanent missions or the ambassadors of the various countries. These were extensions of the States, but because the permanent representatives were always in New York, Geneva or Vienna (the three main places where the UN worked out of), they more or less participated in the day-to-day decision-making processes of the organisation.

Key issues in this area, said Mr. Mandhyan, were the interests of States, the norms they supported, how they collaborated, the give and take involved in, for example, pushing for the estalishment of the International Criminal Court, to what extent they supported UN actions through troop and fund contributions, in the peace-keeping operations as in Sudan or Somalia.

Thus, they played a very important role. But it was important to remember that while the UN had an international character, the States that participated in it were driven by their own interests and had a national character. This sometimes created problems.

Some other actors who were becoming increasingly relevant and powerful were the international media, the social networks and non-governmental organisations of civil society. They were collaborating increasingly and all over the world. They were linking up very often on some issues and were sometimes better organised on some issues; therefore they could push the agenda more strongly than some of the States.

Moving on, Mr. Mandhyan posed the question, how did the Secretary-General do his work? And what was the legal basis of the work?

The legal basis, he said, was spelt out in Articles 97 to 101 of the Charter. Article 97 pointed out that the Secretary-General was the Chief Administrative Officer or the Chief Executive of the UN. But some had posed the question, whether he was the Chairman or the Managing Director. Or both? Was he more secretary, or more general, or was he a “secular Pope” implementing a new Bible called the UN Charter, the Blue Book?

“These are questions that come up from time to time in debates surrounding the role of the Secretary-General. The UN is a living institution, a work in progress, so that each time new norms are developed, the old ones metamorphose and a new dialectic emerges.”

Another aspect of the terms of reference of the Secretary-General was that he would bring to the attention of the Security Council any issue or matter that he deemed to be a threat to international peace and security. This gave him a wide latitude to shape the agenda. But it also meant that this power had to be carefully utilised. He could not bring up everything.

He received letters from all over the world, asking why he was not taking up one issue or another. He had to make a judgement on which issues needed to be taken up. However, the final decisions regarding peace and security were taken by the Security Council.

Mr. Mandhyan said the Secretary-General had to be provided with an independent International Secretariat to implement the decisions of the various legislative organs. This had to be like a civil service, or an impartial Secretariat. But this was a tall order because the States sought control. As a result, the resources provided to develop such a Secretariat and the manner in which appointments were made, in all such matters he had to balance decisions in order to maintain the legitimacy, authority and credibility of the organisation. He faced such issues almost every day.

Turning to the basic architecture, he said the Secretariat had many departments. These were the department of political affairs, which he called the “international state department”; and the department of peace-keeping operations, or the “international pentagon”, involved with peace and security.

There was also the office of legal affairs, or the judicial arm of the Secretariat. These were some of the departments, but there were many others dealing with humanitarian, economic, social and other issues. To coordinate all these, to have them followed through and to bring up issues from the ground was an important aspect of the Secretary-General’s work. He also had to make decisions on policy.

Although the range of issues he had to engage with was quite numerous, he could, at best, think of prevention (like homoeopathy and ayurveda) where one would firsttalk to States to learn whether a conflict was about to break out. Prevention was considered to be the preferable course of action because it was cost-effective.

If a conflict broke out, Mr. Mandhyan said, the process of peace-making started. He would have to make an attempt to bring the parties together, using diplomacy and so on. If that failed, he had to engage in peace-keeping, separating the forces, giving time for wounds to heal and, meanwhile, getting involved in political and economic negotiations, taking the assistance of the World Bank and other institutions to see whether the parties would comply with the agreements they had signed.

Next came the period of peace-building and state-building. An attempt was made to resurrect the institutions of the State, followed by early recovery and development in the long run.

“I use a medical analogy. You have prevention, you have the intensive care unit and then the in-hospitalisation process. For example, Cyprus today is in the hospital but it is outside the intensive care unit; Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia are outside the hospital but they get outpatient physiotherapy and that has been subcontracted to the European Union.

“Over the long term, you try to enhance their sovereignty so that they can heal themselves; that is the objective, because at the end of the day the UN is not a world government, it is a network of States to enable member States to function at their best. That is how we look at it. And that is what the objective of this Secretary-General has been, as, I am sure, it has been of the previous Secretaries-General, too.”

Apart from the above, there were action plans and priorities; for example, the current priority in four to five different areas in the case of peace and security was to see how to reconcile the contest between the humanitarian institutions in the UN and the political institutions. One of these said that political space was more important and insisted that “get the politics right, before you can engage in a humanitarian or technical way”. The other said, “no, give us the space to do that, that would get the politics right”. On the disarmament front, Mr. Mandhyan said, it was crucial to get small arms out of the way because these could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. A lot of killings took place through child soldiers subsequent to the distribution and sale of small arms. It was thus essential to get the arms treaty implemented.

The third priority was to deal with the rapes of women in war zones, especially in Eastern Congo. The UN had recently established a special intervention brigade which was considered sensitive. People had asked whe-ther the UN should be doing the fighting where the States couldn’t control such situations. However, a lot of women’s group were admonishing the UN for not being robust enough. They wanted the UN to protect the women from the hundreds of rapes taking place. One rarely read about them in newspapers here, but they did take place.

And then the question of dealing with terrorism.On Mali, where the Al-Qaeda had placed itself, the Security Council had recently passed a resolution, much to the discomfort of some parts of the Secretariat, that it had to support the actions of States to quell terrorism. This was a completely different ballgame. Could the UN use drones for surveillance?

The UN respected the sovereignty of the States but the drones did not do so. How much forewarning had to be given? All these questions came up on an everyday basis before the Secretary-General. “Let me share with you what is a day in the life of the Secretary-General, because this is the contextual dimension within which things happen. It starts really the previous day. We have a team, the Political Office, which is like an ‘international security council’; it has a number of officers, each allocated different files, different themes. We get feeds from the department of public information which tell us what is going on in different parts of the world based on cables and feeds from UN field offices.

“If it is very urgent, we contact the Secretary-General’s residence or the Deputy Secretary-General or the Chef d’Cabinet (Mr. Vijay Nambiar).

“In the morning cabinet meeting, four or five Principals representing different parts of the UN, talk about what’s important. The earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami disaster in Fukushima, the coup d’état in Madagascar, should there be an inquiry commission in Sri Lanka because international NGOs are calling for it?” The Principals discussed whom to call, the President or someone else? Or was it better to first get information from the ground and see the “temperature” in the Security Council.

Mr. Mandhyan said the Security Council was the political stock exchange of the world. Just as some people observed the markets and their behaviour, members of the SecretaryGeneral’s staff watched the debates in the Security Council. They observed how the different delegates of the permanent and temporary members spoke on a particular issue. These gave a pointer to the “temperature” of the day.

They also had to observe the giveand- take occurring on a range of issues and subjects, as also the “linkage politics” and the “issue politics”. And then came back to brief the Secretary-General around 9.30 or 10; this had to be done very quickly.

The Secretary-General had his own independent telephone calls, he had been on the cocktail circuit the previous
evening, he had got reading materials early in the morning and late in the night. And he had gone through it all before reaching his office. At 10.30 am, a meeting took place with the communications group to decide about the posture to be adopted on an issue and also how to manage expectations at the noon briefing when the world press would be present. The day’s programme included deciding about whom to call and which Heads of State or governments were supposed to come calling. Was Bill Gates coming in to talk about co-operating with the UN on health policy and on AIDS issues? Or George Clooney who was particularly concerned about Sudan and the refugee crisis in Darfur? How could the UN mobilise Hollywood or Bollywood? This was how the Secretary-General went through with his programme for the day. But in the evening, around 5.30 or 6 o’clock, his office received cables from different parts of the world, cables that came in through cryptograms from special envoys on the ground, in the Middle East, in Latin America and elsewhere. And then, in two and a half pages, his office had to give the Secretary-General a note which, without influencing him, indicated the costs and benefits of a particular position that he might take and how it would affect his personal agenda and the institutional agenda and present the most recent facts from the ground.

Once this was drafted and placed before him, the Secretary-General read it religiously every day. Therefore, it had to be very carefully crafted – “and then we are off to the cocktail circuit in the New York diplomatic scene, gathering
tit-bits, relevant information and getting ready for the next day.”

Next, Mr. Mandhyan asked, what were the parameters within which the UN or the Secretary-General operated? First of all, its actions had to have the consent of the States, rather, the unanimity of the permanent five members. It also had to look at whether the mandates were supported by proportionate resources lest it was caught on the wrong foot. There was a tendency for the Security Council to legislate mandates without proportionate resources.

What about the ethical rules through which the UN engaged? Were the actions that the Secretary-General was taking legitimate? Did they enhance the authority of the organisation and did they enhance the power of the UN forces? There were 100,000 UN forces on the ground with 5,000 civilians, about 30 peace-keeping missions and the international police on the ground.

“We have to be cognisant of the actions that we take. Can we do it? Can we sustain it? And can we do it within the resources that have been given to us and within the framework of the Charter? “The essential rule that we try to follow, which is very difficult, is the notion of impartiality. Impartiality is quite different from neutrality; neutrality is a mechanical concept between two opposing sides, but impartiality is not passive, it’s an active principle in which you measure the actions of the Secretary-General or the UN at any given point of time against the norms that guide the United Nations. “There’s a tendency to say, if the Serbs do something wrong, don’t pronounce on it unless the Croats do something wrong and then we condemn them both. But the new, more robust generation of peace-keepers says, if they did wrong, we measure it against the principle and call it.”

Mr. Mandhyan also touched on the issue of speaking truth to power. There were people trying to please the Secretary- General. But his office, when necessary, said, “Sir, this won’t work. You must consider an inquiry commission for Sri Lanka”. Next, transparency versus confidentiality. It had to be remembered that sometimes quiet diplomacy helped, at other times it was public diplomacy that was important. To distinguish which issues needed public diplomacy and which needed quiet diplomacy was very important. The present Secretary-General was a private man, whereas Mr. Kofi Annan had a more public image. However, each was effective in his own way. This Secretary- General had a very strong view on ethics. He had signed compacts with senior managers, judging them at the end of the year. He was also accountable to himself. On the issue of raising the percentage of women in the Cabinet, for the first time, 9 of 16 cabinet members were women. And, for the first time, in the most dangerous field assignments there were at least six or seven women while there were none five years ago. This was a new development and he planned to promote it even further. Sadly, there were very few women in the seniorand mid-level professional positions. The Secretary-General was trying to remedy the situation. It could be said that the Secretary-General was a bit of a Secretary, a bit of a Pope and a bit of a General. It required different things at different times to marshal different kinds of issues and mobilise certain kinds of resources. Dag Hammarskjold (former Secretary-General) had said “the UN was not invented to take the world to heaven but to prevent it from descending to hell”.

And what had he learnt in all his years with the UN? Mr. Mandhyan said that the most important lesson he had learnt was in the nine years that he had spent in the former Yugoslavia, in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.

He had believed all along that where there was a combination of beauty and brains, there was bound to be peace and goodwill. The former Yugoslavia had shattered this belief. “I realised that beauty and knowledge don’t necessarily promote peace and harmony. In the former Yugoslavia, as it disintegrated, the fighting took place amongst not only peasants but also amongst middle-class doctors, professionals and lawyers. They were many amongst them who carried out atrocities. The UN supported the war crimes tribunals and pursued the evidence; it was the job of the UN to get the prisoners, Heads of States, arrested or indicted and sent to The Hague.

“The situation had changed overnight in 1989-90. The former Yugoslavia is one of the most beautiful, stunning places, if you travel from Ljubljana to Skopje, it is simply stunning and there is no coast like the Croatian coast. There are caverns where you can go for walks and there are underground seas and rivers. It’s exceptionally beautiful.
“And yet they fought, so beauty didn’t matter. And they were all educated, so education didn’t matter. Which told me that the veneer of civilisation is very thin. We have to think of our own society, that educated and deeply cultured as our society might be, it can break down any moment…Think of all the massacres that have taken place in and around Bombay, in Gujarat, in the North-East and elsewhere. We have to be on guard against ourselves,” Mr. Mandhyan concluded.

When the floor was thrown open for questions, Mudit Jain asked how the US, when it invaded Afghanistan, overcame the resistance at the UN. Had it bulldozed the UN? Mr. Mandhyan said the Secretary-General had to walk a tight rope, just as the UN institutions had to walk a tight rope, between interests and norms. It had to strike a balance between weak States and strong ones, between today and tomorrow in the area of environmental legislation, between landlocked States versus States which had borders on oceans with regard to global warming.

Each moment presented a certain possibility. The Secretary-General also had to figure out the competing issues at that point of time that were more important than others. For example, the sequence of crises with regard to the Sri Lanka armed forces’ actions against the Tamils in the north was followed immediately by the Libyan crisis, which was followed by the Syrian crisis, at the same time the Arab Spring began and there was also the problem in Tunisia, Bahrain and the perpetual ongoing Arab-Israeli dispute. “On any given day, you have only so much time, so you guard your political capital carefully. In the case of the first Gulf War, the UN had provided a format to the US, but in the second Gulf War it didn’t. Similarly, in Afghanistan there were some lessons learnt on both sides and there was a congruence of minimal interests amongst the great powers.

“So you had a resolution where the UN was given a political role but the primary military role was given to the multinational forces, to the international security assistance force, which was basically NATO. I think it was balancing those very different interests that the UN didn’t push further, because if you stand your ground too much on one, then you may not get an entry in another crisis, for example, in Cote d’Ivoire, in Morocco, in a different place.”

Dr. Shailesh Raina wanted to know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how he would rate the UN performance in ensuring that the world was not descending into hell in the last decade or so. Dr. Mandhyan said he always told the teachers of his daughters that he was less interested in the grades that they actually got but more interested in the efforts that they had made. He followed the same policy while giving marks to his students at Boston College, at Harvard and at Tufts.

If one were to look at the empirical evidence, at the number of crises and at the resources and the mandates given to the UN, the resources were far smaller than the mandates. The annual peace-keeping budget of the UN was $8 billion for 30 missions across the world where law and order had broken down. There were innumerable mandates and a range of issues.

On the other hand, the budget of the New York Police Department was also $8 billion for five boroughs of New York. The population of New York was under one country which was homogenous, while the UN peace-keeping forces were dealing with disparate populations in distant areas.

When he arrived in Iraq with the UN mission, he had to establish a city in the middle of a desert in the palaces of Saddam on the banks of the Tigris; there was no water, no ablution containers. And yet he was supposed to hold negotiations with militants all around. With this in mind, he would be conservative and give it a ‘B-’, a fair, satisfactory score. The effort put in, however, was far more than that.

The UN did not have a distinct personality because it did not have an independent budget; it was dependent on the States. The UN had asked for a standing army. It had a standing regular budget. The Secretary-General had a contingency budget of about $50 million and an emergency relief fund of $100 million. These were small amounts compared to the scale of the crises before the UN.

On account of this, the Secretary-General often had to go to certain countries that were rich to ask for contributions, but those countries in time asked for their pound of flesh. Some countries wanted their human rights records to be ignored. Given this, the UN effort had been tremendous.

“I’ll give you one measure of this: when every Head of State or government comes in September or October to New York for the General Assembly debate, they are eager even for a short meeting with the Secretary-General.

That tells you something – that his office really matters.” It could be said that he was like a Pope making statements when required about situations that had occurred.

And it mattered to countries to be seen in the correct light. International law mattered, so did international behaviour. Even though they probably did not subscribe to it on a day-to-day basis, but when “the priest of the house” said that someone had not done it right, it caused a certain discomfort. “So I would say that the UN performance has been not great, not excellent; it could be better, but it hasn’t been as dismal as it has been made out to be.” Finally, Suresh Jagtiani wanted to know whether it was time to write a new Charter for the UN Secretary-General. A Charter that was more allopathic than homoeopathic in approach?

Dr. Mandhyan said the best doctors were those who were prepared to try all three approaches. Similarly, in the UN sometimes it was necessary to carry out intensive surgery, for example in Cote d’Ivoire after the UN had certified the electoral outcome as being correct and the President would have to step down, otherwise UN troops would be compelled to enforce the mandate. That was allopathic surgery.

There was also division of labour with regional organisations, the African Union and through personal diplomacy to speak to the President who was refusing to step down. “So we tried the persuasive naturopathy approach there. And there were other approaches in between that we applied. I think one should not rule out different options. But diplomacy works best when it works on a basis of strength, both the unanimity of the permanent five in the Council and getting all member States on board, particularly the member States of the region in which the conflict is taking place.

“There is another dimension. Can you amend the Charter to make it strong? The idea of the UN is not to become a world government. It is a network of international governments, it’s not to take over the membership, but actually to enable the membership to function at its best. So capacity-building, institution-building, governance projects are there to crystallise new member States which have came late into the game in the decolonisation period and bring them up to par with older States from a previous period.

“You can amend the Constitution but a constitutional design requires two elements. There must be stability of the framework and sufficient flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. You don’t have to necessarily amend the Charter, but the legal culture and the administrative culture within which the Charter operates can be changed by good leadership and imaginative engagement by the States who constitute the membership of the United Nations,” Mr. Mandhyan concluded.