The case against Ban Ki-Moon

The United Nations is facing new denunciations for being feckless, ineffective, and corrupt. The sun also rose, obituaries were published, children went off to school, and leaves in the northern latitudes began to change color. There was something different about the latest criticism, however: despite its general similarity of content, it came from The Guardian, the flagship of the British left, and The Hudson Institute, virtually the Jesuit order of Washington neoconservatism. That’s a stunning convergence from two groups with that much antagonism between them, and the criticism from both sides is existential: the U.N. is proving itself a failure at protecting international peace and human rights. At the root of all of the U.N.’s existential questions lie this one: united by what? Neocons and British lefties will certainly differ in their answers, something that is both symptomatic of the fundamental problem and beside the point. When people conclude that the U.N. can’t do the job and charges them a fortune not to do it, the institution’s path to extinction is assured.

Let’s start with the new and “reformed” body the U.N. uses to police human rights, the U.N. Human Rights Council. This week, Freedom House published its “worst of the worst” list. It’s no surprise that North Korea is listed. It’s not much more surprising that the Human Rights Council neither recommended nor took any effective action against North Korea, and we have every indication that the U.N. will continue to fail.

We are having this discussion as the U.N. is choosing a General Secretary to follow the disastrous Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan years: Srebrenica, Rwanda, a completely preventable Great Famine in North Korea, Oil-For-Food, and now, Darfur. Surely now the United Nations must break with its paralysis in the face of slaughter, its coziness with terrorists and despots, its corruption. Surely this is the opportunity for the United Nations to define its values in such a way that it can regain some of its squandered sense of purpose.

I’m betting on the U.N. to flub it, and I can even tell you how it’s going to happen. The front-runner to replace Kofi Annan is South Korea’s leftist Foreign Minister, Ban Ki-Moon, a man whose record embodies the very worst we’ve come to expect from the U.N.: passive-aggressive policies that appease evil and confront all efforts to define or enforce standards of civilized conduct. As Foreign Minister, Ban was architect and executor of a no-questions-asked appeasement policy toward North Korea. During those years, North Korea’s human rights record was the worst on earth, and probably the worst since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Kim Jong Il’s absolutist regime, supported by $7 billion in South Korean aid since 1994, stands accused of racial infanticide, the use of gas chambers for horrific chemical weapons on entire families, and a politically selective famine that “cleansed” North Korea of millions while the regime went on an arms-buying spree. North Korea’s forced labor camps are estimated to hold as many as 250,000 people, including thousands of children.

Ban and his government had little to say and nothing to ask as these atrocities went on, and go on to this very day. When resolutions condemning these crimes came before the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and later, the General assembly, South Korea’s ambassadors were instructed to either refuse to vote or abstain. Publicly, Ban’s government failed to raise more than one mild, belated, token call to improve human rights in the North, and then, only in the most vague and general sense and in response to withering criticism from abroad.

During those same years, North Korea’s contempt toward its neighbors and the United Nations itself was difficult to overstate: a nuclear weapons program that defied its own promises and obligations to the contrary; kidnapping and holding dozens of Japanese, hundreds of South Koreans, plus a smattering of Thais, Lebanese, and Chinese; selling uranium hexafluoride to Libya, missiles to Syria and Pakistan, and nuclear technology to Iran; trafficking in methamphetamine and heroin; counterfeiting of foreign currency, drugs, and cigarettes; and flinging missiles toward Japan and Russia despite warnings by those nations, the United States, China, and South Korea itself. Today, North Korea is threatening to test one of the nuclear weapons it claims to have. Safe to say, then: if you’re still paying off Kim Jong Il after all of this, you’re the wrong man to lead the United Nations in a new and better direction.

Ban’s selection would represent the final break between the United Nations and the values it was founded to represent. That is why the Bush Administration should be pulling every string it can — quietly — to block Ban from becoming the next U.N. General Secretary. If those efforts fail, a Ban Ki-Moon tenure is an occasion for the United States to pursue its security interests outside the U.N. That especially goes for North Korea, where Ban would presumably continue his past practice of mollifying Kim Jong Il at the expense of America’s interests and the survival of the North Korean people. It should also cause Americans to reconsider their funding of the United Nations, an institution that must either define and reform itself or gently evolve into a global humanitarian relief agency.