Big powers clip UN secretary general’s wings

By Colum Lynch   
(c) 2017,Foreign Policy · ·   
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres may be the world’s most visible diplomat. But he is quickly learning that he is far from the most powerful.   

In his first weeks on the job, Guterres sought to shake up the big-power monopoly on top U.N. posts, and cast a wider recruiting net, hiring a Nigerian politician as his deputy and a Brazilian diplomat as his chief of staff.   

But his attempts to install aspirants outside the exclusive club of the five veto-wielding U.N. powers - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - to lead the U.N.’s sprawling peacekeeping, political and humanitarian relief operations have largely run aground. That has dashed the hopes of smaller member countries and outside groups seeking a break from his predecessor Ban Ki Moon, who was criticized for being too beholden to the five permanent members of the Security Council.   
The U.N. announced Tuesday that a French diplomat, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, will head up the U.N. peacekeeping department for one year, extending a 20-year lock on the job. Meanwhile, Britain and China remain favourites to retain control over the departments responsible for co-ordinating U.N. emergency relief operations and economic and social affairs. And the United States will keep the top political job, which it has held for the past decade, after Guterres tried and failed to persuade Obama administration officials to allow a national outside the big five powers to take on the role. Guterres has asked Jeffrey Feltman, an Obama appointee, to remain as under secretary general in the department of policy affairs until April, 2018.   

The French and British “dug in,” insisting that they hold on to the top jobs at heading the U.N. peacekeeping and emergency relief efforts, according to the official.   

Any hope the Trump administration would show more flexibility on the jobs front were quickly dashed when Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, publicly blocked Guterres’ appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, as the head of the U.N. mission in Libya.   

The scuttling of Fayyad’s appointment has driven home the fact that Guterres faces “serious political constraints” in calling his own shots, said Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. But Gowan said Guterres may have an ace in his hand.   

Guterres placed a time limit on Tuesday’s appointments, committing only to keeping French and American leadership of the peacekeeping and political departments for a year. In the meantime, his office will carry out plans for a reorganization of the U.N. bureaucracy that could eliminate some of these posts or merge them.   

“If Guterres is smart, he can use the reorganization to strengthen his own position” by reducing the power of the department heads beneath him, Gowan argued.   

Guterres is now grappling with simmering resentment from the rest of the U.N.’s 193 governments, who sought assurances during his campaign that he would end the big-power monopoly that they believe runs contrary of the spirit of the U.N. Charter and a succession of resolutions by the U.N. General Assembly that explicitly call for an end to the practice.   

A group of 25 countries that recently called on Guterres to open the top jobs up for competition among nationals from the U.N.’s 193 member states. Those groups are now frustrated that the selection of senior appointees is largely playing out in secret.   

Breaking the big powers’ hold on the senior jobs “is the only way he can truly ensure the independence of the U.N.’s policies or advice,” argued Carne Ross, the founder of Independent Diplomat, a New York-based nonprofit that provides diplomatic advisory services to the United Nations.   

The appointment process has long fueled suspicions that U.N. Secretaries General have traded top jobs to big powers in exchange for supporting their candidacies. That perception can do “serious damage” to the U.N. ability to serve as an honest brokers, said Bob Orr, a former top official in Kofi Annan’s and Ban Ki-moon’s administrations.