South Korea’s soft-spoken foreign minister Ban Ki-Moon faces the toughest testing of his long career when he succeeds Kofi Annan at the end of the year as U.N. secretary-general. The question here is how or whether he will use his powers of persuasion to get the U.N. to play a pivotal role in bringing North Korea to its senses when it comes to nuclear weapons. The U.N. under Annan has been largely ineffective, unable to curb its own corruption while failing to stop long-running conflicts anywhere. Ban may have the chance quite quickly to begin to repair the damage in his own bailiwick, the Korean peninsula.
For Ban, the challenge will be to go beyond rhetorical condemnations. The U.N. Security Council’s latest nonbinding resolution, warning North Korea not to make good on its threat to test a nuclear warhead, is a case in point. The resolution was toothless, bereft of any hint of retribution.
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As foreign minister, Ban has assiduously pursued a soft-line policy of reconciliation with North Korea on behalf of South Korea’s left-leaning president, Roh Moo Hyun. Against this background, who can believe this consummate diplomat will use his influence as secretary-general to curb the North’s nuclear ambitions?
Ban’s success in winning the approbation of powers as diverse as the United States, China and Russia for the U.N.’s top job shows he may blink before going to the brink. China and Russia, like South Korea, oppose economic sanctions. Japan, more than the U.S., advocates action — a view strongly pressed by Japan’s newly installed, rightist prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in talks Sunday and Monday in Beijing and Seoul.
Whenever the U.S. has called for strengthening measures against North Korea, Ban has sided totally with China in opposing a firm response. Yes, he fully approved a Security Council resolution enjoining member nations against dealings with North Korea that might aid and abet its missile program after the North test-fired seven missiles in July. No, he did not want this resolution to serve as the basis for strict sanctions against trade and financial relations that might further cripple the North.
John Bolton, the hard-charging U.S. ambassador to the U.N., gave unreserved approval of Ban for secretary-general, but Roh sometimes gives the impression of thinking a nuclear test might not be that big a deal, and the South continues to ship food and cement for reconstruction from flood damage.
Ban’s penchant for meaningless compromise reflects his own outlook plus his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the U.N. After early assignments on the U.N. at South Korea’s foreign ministry and its U.N. mission, Ban rose to the rank of ambassador in Vienna where he served in 1999 as chairman of the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. His experience broadened when he became Korea’s chief envoy to the U.N. while a prominent Korean political figure, Han Seung Soo, then foreign minister, began a one-year stint as president of the U.N. General Assembly in September 2001 on the very day of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Distressingly, in his carefully modulated campaign for secretary-general, Ban emulated Annan’s soporific, ineffective style. Hosting Annan in Seoul last May, Ban pitched his remarks in the same bland tones as the secretary-general as they took turns issuing pro forma demands for North Korea to give up its nukes. Together, they made plain they did not agree with Washington’s emphasis on North Korea’s human rights or counterfeit currency, giving nuclear weapons “priority.”
At the same time, in magician-like diplomacy, Ban persuaded Roh to sublimate his distaste for U.S. “toughness” toward North Korea and join President Bush last month in Washington in a call for a deliberately vague “comprehensive” approach to getting the North to return to six-party talks on its nukes.
Ban has adopted an equally frustrating response on the North’s deplorable human rights record, preferring to avoid the topic. That doesn’t stop him, though, from speaking out against human rights abuses, asin a U.N. speech calling for “global action to strengthen the values of human rights and democracy.”
Now Ban has to rise above the double-talk and try seriously to stop North Korea from forging ahead as a nuclear power. Otherwise we face an Asian nuclear arms race in which Japan and Taiwan quickly develop their own warheads and China builds up its existing arsenal — all a precursor to carnage on an unimaginable scale.
Journalist Donald Kirk has covered Korea and political tensions in northeast Asia for three decades.
