Taking office at UN, Ban faces key decisions

United Nations, Jan 2: South Korean Ban Ki-Moon, the new United Nations Secretary-General, will arrive for his first day of work today and will speak to UN staff anxious for details on his agenda and who will fill key jobs.

So far Ban, the eighth United Nations Secretary-General, has kept his plans under wraps after winning an endorsement from the UN Security Council in October. He has visited headquarters surrounded by dozens of his Korean colleagues.

But Ban, 62, a former Foreign Minister whose English is relatively fluent and his French halting, says he will arrive at work early today for a speech to UN staff that will be broadcast by video to its offices abroad.

Over the weekend his office announced two appointments.

Indian Vijay Nambiar, a former adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, was named as his chief of staff and Michele Montas, an award-winning Haitian journalist as his chief spokeswoman.

But other top posts may not be filled for some time, except for administration and management, which UN sources say will go to Alicia Barcena, Annan's former chief of staff, to replace American Christopher Burnham. Ban also has not yet named a deputy secretary-general, expected to be a woman, or filled the key posts of peacekeeping and political affairs, which France, the United States and Britain want.

Ban, who officially became secretary-general on New Year's Day, faces the same global issues Annan did -- the carnage in Sudan's Darfur, peacekeepers in 18 countries, tensions in West Asia and combating poverty.

He said he hoped to be known ''as a secretary-general who is accessible, hard-working, and prepared to listen attentively.'' Annan, a 68-year old Ghanaian, who was secretary-general for 10 years, and his elegant wife Swedish wife Nane, the lawyer-artist niece of Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, left New York for Europe today after spending New Year's Eve with close friends at a Cajun jazz club. They intend to take weeks of rest at an undisclosed location.

UN REFORMS

Many of Ban's public comments have dealt with UN management issues. He has pledged generally to press ahead with efforts to reform the bureaucracy to make it more effective and responsive to the 192 U.N. member nations.

But developing nations are expected to stymie him as they did Annan since the General Assembly controls the budget and many management posts, seeing the reforms as a Western plot to deprive them of jobs.

After taking the oath of office on December 14, Ban, 62, said he would try to ''act as a harmonizer and bridge-builder'' and then joked with reporters that he was nicknamed ''a slippery eel'' but insisted he was a ''media friendly person.'' At his inauguration, he also put vowed to restore trust in the U.N. secretariat and set ''the highest ethical standard.'' The words were widely seen by diplomats as a slap at Annan, whose tenure was stained by findings of corruption and mismanagement in the billion oil-for-food program for Iraq and in U.N. procurement.

Compared to the idealistic Annan, Ban may say less and lead a United Nations more aware of its limitations and the small space any secretary-general has to maneuver.

But Ban may be less adept at advancing the outspoken Annan's effort to give the institution a human face and a strong belief that a government's duty was to protect the rights of individuals.

Still Ban told a December dinner of UN correspondents: ''Rest assured that my actions will be anything but slippery: I am a man of action.'' Ban is living at a hotel for months, while the elegant town house overlooking Manhattan's East River undergoes extensive structural renovations, the first since 1950.

REUTERS

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