UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is forcing senior officials to resign so he can install his own staff as part of a sweeping overhaul of the world body. Mr Ban, the UN's first Asian head in 35 years, also wants to split the scandal-plagued peacekeeping department in two to reduce costs and red tape. The move to "designate his own staff" at the top of the UN hierarchy by the end of the month is detailed in a leaked internal memorandum, obtained by The Australian, that has emerged only days after the former South Korean foreign minister replaced Kofi Annan as the world's chief diplomat.

The memo outlines a radical blueprint under which Mr Ban will "lead by example" to "change the culture of the United Nations".

Mr Ban has already courted controversy by picking Tanzanian law professor Asha-Rose Migiro, who has expressed support for Iran's nuclear program, as his deputy.

Dated January 4 and written by Monaco's head of mission, Gilles Noghes, in his capacity as head of the Western European and Other States Group, the memo quotes Mr Ban as expressing concern at continuing incidence of sexual misconduct by UN peacekeepers. He wants the scourge fixed.

Mr Ban blames the misconduct on a bloated Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

He wants the department broken up into one department that focuses on operational deployments and another to specialise in training and logistics.

Diplomatic sources told The Australian that Mr Ban's proposed reforms have the strong support of the US and Japan - two of the UN's biggest financial backers - which are likely to secure control of top UN posts in the shakeup.

"During the last two months of transition, Mr Ban Ki-moon found it was necessary to make the DPKO more efficient," Mr Noghes's summary of a meeting...

http://claudiarosett.pajamasmedia.com/2007/01/07/migiro.php#comments

Claudia Rosett

January 7, 2007 9:10 PM

From Tanzania to Turtle Bay - What's Going On?


Asha-Rose Migiro -- the UN's New Number Two	UN

We now have yet another example of why the UN ought to hold public confirmation hearings for top appointments. Of course, given some of the creepier regimes holding UN seats, there’s no guarantee that a public confirmation process would result in higher quality UN top staff (witness how even in the U.S., our tortured confirmation process bounced the best ambassador we’ve sent to the UN in decades — John Bolton). But it would at least provide a tad more information than the hush-hush process with which the new UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, like his predecessors, is now stocking the UN’s top ranks. Take, for instance, his decision announced Friday to appoint as his deputy the foreign minister of Tanzania, a woman named Asha-Rose Migiro.

Pressed at the UN noon briefing for details on Migiro’s qualifications to manage the secretariat of the UN’s sprawling $20-billion-per-year system —with its rich history of waste, fraud and abuse — the spokeswoman cited Migiro’s recent experience chairing a regional conference for the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Maybe that’s all it takes. The U.S. Mission — minus Bolton — has been enthusing about Migiro’s appointment. But there are some mysteries to all this that could stand a lot more explaining. Here are two:

1) The Tanzania connection. Last year, when Ban, a South Korean, was campaigning for the job of UN Secretary-General, Seoul became unusually generous in its largesse to a number of countries, including Tanzania — which happened at the time to hold one of the ten rotating seats on the UN Security Council — and thus had an influential voice in the choice of Ban. In an article published Sept. 29, 2006 and headlined “Millions of dollars and a piano may put Korean in UN’s top job,” the Times of London reported that South Korea last year pledged $18 million in aid to Tanzania, or about four times what it had given in the space of a dozen years from 1991 to 2003. South Korean officials protested that the aid increase was already in the pipeline before Ban’s candidacy, and that there was no link between the two. But it would behoove Ban to explain a lot more about why, of all the candidates in all the world, he tapped Tanzania’s Migiro.

2) The Iranian connection. The item linked here comes courtesy of the Iranian press, via Russia, so let’s not take it at face value. But if Migiro wants to correct the impression this story creates, that she’s fool enough to believe the ayatollahs are all about atoms for peace, and endorse them in their nuclear quest, now would be the time. Maybe while she’s at it, she can tell us more about that reference in the last sentence to the activities of “Iran’s Construction Jihad Bureau in Tanzania.”

Bolton said he liked the guy.

But, I ask anyone and everyone: when the sh&***^ hits the fan over North Korea how will the world/media/everyone treat a sitting UN General Secretary who was just previously the foreign minister for South Korea, unless, in order to not appear biased toward South Korea he in fact bends over backwards for North Korea!?!?

When two nations are in such a continuing confrontational military stance with each other, with extreme risks for everyone if they clash, as are North and South Korea, how can the leadership of the UN be seen as "impartial" when that leadership is in fact a recent high official of one of the belligerents?? It can't. So Ban will in fact seek appeasing UN moves with the North to prove his impartiality.

Maybe there is some "correctness" (somewhere, in someone's mind)in the idea that it was "time for an Asian" UN General Secretary. As long as the confrontation with North Korea continues, it is/was not time for ANY Korean UN General Secretary. I would have preferred the retiring Japanese Prime Minister.

Regardless of the feckless, immoral, innate hypocrisy of the UN to begin with!!!!

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