Next UN secretary-general is BAN!!

It was like an Olympic race. What mattered was participation, not winning! For a political lightweight, India’s Shashi Tharoor put up a commendable performance. Pitted against him were foreign ministers who had brokered deals and negotiated truces. Compared to them, he was not even a diplomat, but just an international civil servant. Yet India backed him, despite misgivings form a large section of diplomats and foreign policy expert. To them his candidature had come as a surprise, and his defeat a foregone conclusion. But the real surprise was that he got 10 encouraging votes managed to stay in the race till about the end, improving his chances with each straw poll. What got him out was three discourage vote cast by the big five.

Who is the main to vote against India? Is a big question… There was news around that has pointed the finger at US. The evidence against the US is a statement made by John Boltin, its permanent representative to the UN that the US did not want another insider. The surprise here was South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon who got 14 votes in the final straw poll and not get any 'discouraging votes, is set to occupy the hot seat on the 38th floor of the UN building in the New York in December. The 62-year-old soft-spoken, mild-mannered has vowed to bring in reforms and to play an active role in trying to persuade North Korea to scrape its nuclear weapons program. Ban is expected to emerge with fresh announcement to conduct nuclear test indicates the challenge a head.

There was some fault on Ban’s human rights record for refusing to grant the Dalai Lama a visa to visit South Korea. The western media’s reports that the Seoul govt. had tried to buy the UN post by increasing aid to Tanzania and Greece has put him in a bad light, but Ban refuses these are groundless. The diplomat has a degree in international relation and masters in public administration form the John F.Kennedy school of Govt. at Harvard University. As a teenager, he reveled his desire to be a diplomat when he met president Kennedy at the White House. When Ban takes over, he will be the first Asian to lead the UN since Burmese U.Thant.