The General Assembly held a “dialogue” on May 7, 2021, with the UN’s member countries and António Guterres, the only officially recognized candidate for UN secretary-general and an incumbent. Only two civil society groups were able to ask questions across the three-hour session. Credit: ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
By Barbara Crossette
NEW YORK, May 12 2021 (IPS)
It was all over in one crucial week. Barring an unforeseen hitch, António Guterres is the clear winner of a second, five-year term as secretary-general of the United Nations, beginning on Jan.1, 2022. This was not a surprise: he had no major competition and the process moved faster than expected.
A three-hour question-and-answer session with UN diplomats from around the world in the General Assembly on May 7 appeared to support a growing sense internationally that the Security Council may decide by late June or July, three months before the normal deadline for a candidacy to go to the General Assembly for final affirmation.
Guterres spoke mostly in generalities at the session, but he sometimes used statistics and technical points about his vision for the UN in the ensuing years.
The center of his campaign in 2016, on preventing conflicts, has not been borne out under his current leadership, some diplomats contend.
The Armenian ambassador, Mher Margaryan, asked Guterres, for example, how he would “strengthen” the UN’s response to early-warning signs of atrocity crimes occurring. (United States President Joe Biden recently recognized the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.) Guterres answered, in brief, that the problem was not missing early-warning signs but “the problem is in early action.”
In July, the rotating presidency of the Council will be held by France, which may announce the decision to back the 72-year-old Guterres, a diplomat from Latin America, told PassBlue. The European Union has been the strongest supporter of the incumbent secretary-general, as Guterres is from Portugal, so a fellow European. He was the only candidate proposed by a government, Portugal.
The Biden administration has not formally and publicly endorsed Guterres. In remarks to a Security Council debate on multilateralism, also on May 7, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke of a renewed American commitment to the UN Charter and international cooperation after the destructive Trump years.
“Nationalism is resurgent, repression is rising. Rivalries among countries are deepening — and attacks against the rules-based order are intensifying,” he said to his fellow Council members and the public. “Now, some question whether multilateral cooperation is still possible.”
“Multilateralism is still our best tool for tackling big global challenges, like the one that’s forcing us to gather on a screen today rather than today rather than around a table,” Blinken added, describing the Council’s virtually staged session because of the pandemic.
On May 4, the General Assembly president, Volkan Bozkir, explained in a news conference why he had ruled out candidates other than Guterres for the May 7 event. Seven people have submitted applications to him in the last few months, and civil society organizations were also calling for a wider slate. Bozkir, a Turk, passed all applications to the Council, he said at the news conference.
“It looks like the Security Council has a view that only candidates or applicants supported by a country will be considered by the Security Council,” he said to numerous questions on the process. None of the applicants has been recognized by Bozkir or any of the monthly rotating Council presidents, who both lead the procedure.
Further confusing reporters, Bozkir added, “And again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a person who is supported by a country will get the guarantee of becoming a candidate.”
Armenia’s ambassador to the UN asked how the organization could better react to early-warning signs of atrocities, May 7, 2021.
None of the Council’s permanent members with veto power — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — has so far publicly questioned a second term for Guterres. And Guterres has certainly not ruffled those countries’ feathers too much, to the consternation of certain civil society advocates, like Human Rights Watch.
In 2001, the US vetoed a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt and persuaded other Council members to back Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, who then served two terms unopposed.
How and why did Guterres win the approval of the Security Council members so easily? With Western support locked in, he spoke last week by phone with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, without revealing whether the subject of the secretary-generalship came up. China has welcomed his bid for a second term.
Guterres is planning a trip to Moscow from May 12 to 13. The speech by Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, at the Security Council session on May 7 was the most bitter during the discussion of multilateralism. His remarks were directed at Western democracies.
Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, has been what could be described as an acceptable head of the UN for many of its 193 member governments.
He is, however, not a popular or well-known figure outside the UN, nor is he much liked among many employees of the organization, according to civil society groups, advocates and some UN staff themselves.
He is criticized for being a secretive minimalist who has not dealt well with internal crises, such as the continuing, documented sexual abuse in and around UN peacekeeping and the scant help available for survivors of rape and other assaults.
Women are often the most vulnerable people not only where UN peacekeeping operations are based or in active conflict zones but also in refugee camps or ad hoc congregations of displaced people. Men and children also suffer.
When babies are born of rape, they often grow up in extreme poverty, hungry and stigmatized for life, and the UN defers the resolution of these hardships to the national governments of the peacekeepers instead of getting involved directly.
Guterres said on May 7 in the General Assembly in response to critiques and questions from civil society participants (only two were given the opportunity to be heard) that the UN was, for example, meeting resistance from governments over problems like conducting paternity tests of peacekeepers when complaints were lodged.
In his introductory remarks to diplomats taking part in the live session, in which he appeared flustered at times, he acknowledged that much of civil society had not been offered seats “at the world’s main diplomatic table.” He added that cities, the corporate world and young people are “essential voices that must he heard.”
He also said, agreeing with some envoys who raised the issue at the dialogue, that the UN system needed better coordination of all its parts — agencies, programs and semiautonomous bodies like the World Health Organization. Yet that bureaucratic challenge has never been solved by any secretary-general, despite attempts at reform.
The most insistent opposition to the renewal of Guterres’s appointment came from advocates for the election of a woman and diverse groups that generally backed a more transparent process for selecting the chief official of the UN, such as the 1 for 7 Billion campaign.
The UN, at 76 years old, has never been led by a woman. The demands of advocates included adding women to the list of candidates and not requiring applicants to have official endorsement of governments. But both requests have been overlooked by Bozkir and the monthly Security Council presidents.
The important involvement of advocates for a woman as secretary-general is a sign of changing times. More women are emerging in top political positions in many countries, corporations and other high-profile organizations.
Some, like Angela Merkel, the retiring German chancellor, made it clear that she did not want the job of UN secretary-general, despite persistent questions about her interests. Other women elected as prime ministers or presidents of their countries think they would be more useful in geopolitics as national leaders.
And some of the women who could have challenged Guterres this year saw the light early on: as a white, male incumbent who knew how to navigate around the self-interests of the permanent Council members, he was a shoo-in.
In 2016, under a more open campaign process, there was no incumbent. Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean who had completed two terms, was also a widely criticized secretary-general for an administration that was often cloaked in secrecy and shielded by fellow South Korean aides.
Well-qualified women competed to be elected his successor in 2016, a position that ultimately went to Guterres, a former prime minister.
Among the women competing in 2016 were Irina Bokova, a Bulgarian and former director-general of Unesco; Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand and administrator of the UN Development Program; Kristalina Georgieva, also Bulgarian, a former European Commissioner for International Cooperation and now managing director of the International Monetary Fund; and Susana Malcorra, who had been Ban’s chief of staff before becoming Argentina’s foreign minister when she ran.
This year, there were no equally qualified women interested in seeking the job against considerable odds; the few campaigns that surfaced — including “protest candidates” against UN “corruption” — quickly became sideshows.
Even one potentially serious candidate who emerged recently, Rosalía Arteaga, a short-lived president of Ecuador, said she had the support of President Lenín Moreno but then asked him to drop it, as she preferred to be a “civil society” candidate, she told PassBlue in an email. (A new Ecuadorean president, Guillermo Lasso, is to be inaugurated this month.)
Many feminist organizations, realizing the futility of launching campaigns for candidates this year, opted to wait it out until the 2027 term. With the world in crisis on many fronts and a seasoned politician in charge at the UN, it was believed that being a woman was not enough this year. Moreover, no woman wanted to compete, keenly aware of the negative optics of losing.
A list of six Latin American women — some former heads of state, like Michelle Bachelet of Chile (now the UN high commissioner for human rights) — circulated this spring among high-level political circles in the region to test who might be the most successful candidate to run for secretary-general next time.
But Eastern Europe, which tried to win the current term because it was that region’s unofficial turn to claim the job, is ready to contest Latin America on that front.
Last month, Maritza Chan, a diplomat from Costa Rica, pointed out in a meeting at the UN about the overall secretary-general selection process that her country “strongly believes that the time has come to select a female secretary-general. . . . We believe that should qualifications among candidates be equal, we should choose a woman.”
By doing this, she added, “we uphold the principle of equality and empower the women of today and tomorrow.”
Lyric Thompson is the senior director of policy and advocacy at the International Center for Research on Women, which grades the work of Guterres with annual report card on gender issues. He got a B for 2020, up from a C- in 2017 and a B- in both 2018 and 2019.
Thompson, who was a member of the Biden administration’s delegation to the UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women this year, pointed to tough speeches by Guterres warning of pushbacks on women’s rights and his frequent condemnations of worsening violence against women and girls. He also attempted, with limited success, to persuade governments to donate more financially to UN initiatives on women.
Indeed, Guterres calls entrenched patriarchy “stupid,” and told an audience in New York City early in 2020: “Just as slavery and colonialism were a stain on previous centuries, women’s inequality should shame us all in the twenty-first.”
In an interview with PassBlue early this year, Thompson said that feminists were focusing on the next election for a secretary-general.
“I think we will see an unprecedented drive for a female SG after his second term,” she said, adding that “this is a long way off . . . which means the UN will not have had a woman leader across its 81-year-history.”
The post The UN’s Guterres, an Incumbent With Strong Backing by Europe, Is Bound to Win Another Term appeared first on PassBlue.
Barbara Crossette is United Nations correspondent for The Nation, a senior fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the City University of New York, contributing editor at PassBlue.com, and a freelance writer on foreign policy and international affairs. Most recently she was a co-author with George Perkovich of a section on India in the 2009 book Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World.
Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
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Barbara Crossette, PassBlueLa question palestinienne, notamment les derniers développements au niveau de la bande de Gaza, a été le centre d’une discussion téléphonique entre le chef de l’État Abdelmadjid Tebboune et son homologue turc Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Selon un communiqué de la Présidence de la République rendu public hier mardi 11 mai 2021, « le Président de la […]
L’article Tebboune et Erdogan abordent la question palestinienne est apparu en premier sur .
Les sites de vaccination contre le coronavirus du département du Littoral connaissent de l'affluence depuis quelque temps. L'information a été donnée, mardi 11 mai 2021, par la Directrice départementale de la santé.
« (...) Nous avons assez d'affluence sur les sites », a indiqué Mathilde Houssou, Directrice départementale de la santé du Littoral. Cet engouement pour la vaccination contre la Covid-19 s'explique par l'élargissement de la cible à toutes personnes âgées de 18 ans et à une prise de conscience.
La DDS rassure les personnes encore réticentes en ces termes : « Depuis que la vaccination a commencé, nous n'avons pas noté d'effets secondaires graves. Il n'y a eu que quelques rares effets comme des douleurs aux points d'injection, la fièvre qui sont des réactions normales qu'on rencontre avec tous les vaccins ».
M. M.
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Département du Littoral :
Direction départementale de la santé du Littoral
CNHU
CHU MEL
Zone sanitaire Cotonou 1-4
Centre de Santé Placodji
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Commune de Parakou
Centre Hospitalier Départemental Universitaire du Borgou
Centre de Santé de la Commune de Parakou
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Hôpital d'Instruction des Armées
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Commune de Nikki
Centre de santé Nikki
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Département des Collines :
Hôpital de Zone Dassa
Département du Couffo :
Hôpital de Zone Aplahoué
Département de la Donga :
Hôpital de Zone Djougou
Département de l'Alibori :
Hôpital de Zone Kandi
Département de l'Atacora :
Centre Hospitalier Départemental Natitingou
Département du Mono :
Centre Hospitalier Départemental Lokossa
Département du Zou :
Centre Hospitalier Départemental Abomey
Faites-vous vacciner pour vous protéger et protéger les autres.
Pour plus de renseignement veuillez appeler le numéro gratuit 136.
C'était un dimanche après midi. Après un week-end de toute beauté passé en famille sur la côte ouest de Cotonou, nous voilà de retour chez nous dans la paisible banlieue nord de la capitale. A peine ai-je fait rentrer la voiture et rouvert mon réseau que mon téléphone commença à sonner à tout rompre. C'était Judith, la petite sœur de ma tendre moitié. Sacrée Judith ! Elle est tout sauf tempérée. Boute-en-train incomparable elle a l'art de faire rire en toutes circonstances.
Ronde, grassouillette et hyper intelligente, elle dirige de main de maître sa chaîne de supérettes avec un certain succès. Imaginant déjà la scène drolatique qu'elle me fera pour ses appels infructueux, je décrochai un sourire au coin des lèvres. A ses premiers mots, mon visage se figea et mon sourire se transforma en rictus.
Mon épouse qui m'observait de l'autre bout de la pièce se précipita vers moi l'air interrogateur avec de grands gestes. Judith que me dis-tu ? Suis-je finalement arrivé à articuler après d'interminables secondes durant lesquelles je l'écoutai me narrer sa mésaventure. Judith venais de perdre sa maison dans un incendie. Pendant son récit, j'avais eu le réflexe de mettre le haut parleur du téléphone. Le feu serait parti de la maison voisine, une cour commune comme nous les appelons communément. Un ventilateur défaillant en serait la cause. Mon épouse, compatissante lança à sa sœur :Ditho ne pleure ! Un bâtiment fut-il très coûteux reste remplaçable. Tu t'en construiras un autre.
En attendant viens habiter ici il y a assez de place. Dès demain je t'aiderai avec les courses de l'assurance. A ces mots les sanglots s'amplifièrent à l'autre bout du fil. Puis entre deux gémissements on entendit presque comme un murmure : je ne l'ai pas encore assurée, la maison. Puis les pleurs redoublèrent d'intensité. Quoi ? Comment ? Ma femme et moi, nous nous sommes exclamés de concert. Judith comment as-tu pu faire preuve d'une telle négligence ? Toi la femme d'affaires de la famille. Mon épouse n'a pas pu se retenir… Coupant court à ce qui prenait l'allure d'un procès. Je repris :Ce n'est pas le moment chérie. Calme-toi, belle sœur, on en parlera et on trouvera une solution. Tu sais que nous sommes là pour toi.Judith si prévenante a failli cette fois-ci. Et ça lui a coûté des années de labeur. Je n'ai pas pu fermer l'œil de toute cette nuit. Ce soir là, j'ai vérifié discrètement la bouteille de gaz, tous les appareils débranchés...et je n'ai pas pu m'empêcher de jeter des regards inquiets du côté des voisins. Oui nous aussi, nous avons une cour commune mitoyenne....et si ??? Tous les scénarii cauchemardesques possibles m'ont assailli avant le lever du jour.
Dès le matin, et contrairement à mes habitudes, je me suis hâté de m'apprêter et de partir au boulot. Et pour cause ! Moi non plus, je n'avais pas renouvelé notre assurance maison. Eh oui ! Négligence quand tu nous tiens. La nuit blanche que j'ai passée m'a permis d'envoyer un message à mon agent d'assurance. A huit heures tapantes j'étais devant la Générale des d'assurances du Bénin. Geoffroy m'attendait déjà. Je lui remis mon chèque et le pria de faire le nécessaire dans la matinée. Puis, j'attendis avec impatience au bureau l'arrivée libératrice de Geoffroy. A 8h50mn il était là. Quelle prouesse ! J'eu envie de le serrer dans mes bras tellement j'étais soulagé. Enfin, ma maison était à nouveau assurée avec ASTRIM de la GAB. Un produit d'assurance simplement parfait qui couvre tous les risques imaginables d'une maison et même les dommages aux tiers. La mésaventure de Judith m'avait réveillée de ma somnolence. Je me résolu à ne plus jamais banaliser une assurance. Le malheur de Judith aurait pu m'arriver et j'aurais tout perdu par simple négligence. Et vous qu'attendez-vous pour souscrire à la TOUS RISQUES MAISON (ASTRIM) de la GAB ?
Pour compter de lundi 17 mai 2021, l'enrôlement au RAVIP ne se fera plus au siège de l'Agence nationale d'identification des personnes (ANIP) à Cotonou Cadjèhoun. Le gestionnaire mandataire, Cyrille Gougbédji, à travers une note en date du 10 mai 2021 informe que la demande desdites pièces peut se faire désormais dans les arrondissements.
Par une note en date du 10 mai 2021, le gestionnaire mandataire du RAVIP rappelle que « l'acceptation des demandes de carte nationale d'identité biométrique est subordonnée à la présentation d'un acte de naissance sécurisée et d'un Certificat d'identification personnelle ».
Selon Cyrille Gougbédji, la première vague de formalisation dans les ministères étant satisfaite, les unités d'appui seront à nouveau déployées dans les ministères et autres services en collaboration avec les points focaux desdits services à partir du mercredi 19 mai 2021. « Un calendrier de deuxième passage sera rendu disponible à cet effet », a-t-il précisé.
Le coût du certificat d'identification personnelle selon le gestionnaire mandataire, passe de 2500F à 1500F non plastifié, ou 2800F à 1800F, plastifié.
Ces nouvelles dispositions ont été prises par l'ANIP non seulement pour soulager les peines des usagers, mais aussi, faire face aux difficultés de gestion de masse de demandeurs dans un environnement exigu.
F. A. A.