Nuke test overshadows SKorea's UN selection

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9: South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon will be formally nominated as UN secretary-general today, ironically only hours after North Korea defied the world body by announcing a nuclear test.

The UN Security Council will cast its votes, effectively anointing Ban as the successor to Secretary-General Kofi Annan whose 10 years in office expire on December 31. Six other candidates withdrew, leaving members to vote for Ban only.

The 192-member UN General Assembly must give final approval to Ban's nomination, which usually follows within a week or two. The vote is expected to be positive.

Some diplomats, including Japan's UN Ambassador Kenzo Oshima, have speculated that North Korea's announcement on October 3 of plans to carry out the underground nuclear test was timed, in part, to coincide with Ban's selection in an effort to get world attention.

With Security Council members meeting anyway, Japan, the current council president, as well as the United States, made clear last week the 15-member council would hold immediate consultations if North Korea conducted its first test.

The council on Friday urged North Korea not to carry out a test, warning Pyongyang of unspecified consequences if it did.

In Washington, the United States said it expected the Security Council to take immediate action to respond to what the White House called an provocative act. Members usually consult first, sometimes for hours, to ascertain facts before taking a common public position.

Ban, 62, would be the eighth secretary-general in the world body's 60-year history. He will inherit a bureaucracy of 9,000 staff, a 5 billion dollar budget and more than 90,000 peacekeepers in 18 operations around the globe that cost another 5 billion dollar.

CONFLICT MEDIATION

It remains to be seen how he might deal with the North Korean nuclear issue -- to say nothing of the many other conflicts he will be involved in mediating and which few others want to solve.

The low-keyed Ban will be a contrast to Annan, a Ghanaian who in his first five years won a Nobel Peace Prize and was sometimes dubbed a diplomatic rock star, before financial scandals took over the headlines over the past few years.

But some diplomats, particularly US Ambassador John Bolton, would like to see a secretary-general be an administrator and have a lower profile around the world.

Among his colleagues in Seoul, everyone seems to agree that Ban is very pleasant and hard-working.

Jang Sung-min, a former presidential aide and member of parliament said, ''He probably won't do a bad job. It is really hard to think of a problem with Ban. Maybe that's his strong point -- that there's nothing peculiar about him.'' Although Annan was criticized regularly in the United States, Europeans viewed him more favorably and many so far have ignored the imminent arrival of Ban.

Ban won't be ''the sort of activist diplomat, ready to seize the initiative, which we saw in Kofi Annan,'' said Dick Leurdijk, UN expert at the Netherlands Clingendael Institute of International Relations.

''I think he will be more like his Asian predecessor U Thant, who just took care of the shop,'' he said, referring to the Burmese diplomat who held the post from 1961-71.

At the United Nations, a senior diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of Ban, ''I think he will bring genuinely a huge amount of diplomatic experience.

But he said, ''He will not be instantly friendly to a US audience. He will need to learn how to handle the media.''

Reuters