INTERVIEW: former UN official urges more transparent process to select Secretary-General

Edward Mortimer is an ardent believer in the need to change the way in which the Secretary-General of the United Nations is selected, and he is hopeful that this can happen.

“I think there has got to be a more transparent and more inclusive process,” said Mr. Mortimer, who served as Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s speechwriter, policy advisor and Director of Communications from 1998 to 2006.

“I think there’s something for everybody to do here to change this process and ensure that we really look for the best person – whatever their gender, whatever their nationality – who will do the best job for the world. This is a unique job and it’s an enormous responsibility. And the world needs to find the best person to do that job.”

Recently, Mr. Mortimer helped to compile a selection of Mr. Annan’s speeches entitled, “We the Peoples.” The two worked together during some of the most tumultuous years for the UN, as it grappled with challenges such as the Iraq invasion and the oil-for-food crisis.

As the UN prepares to celebrate its 70^th anniversary, the former journalist and academic sat down with the UN News Centre to reflect on his years with the Organization and the need for change as well as share his thoughts on the art of speechwriting. Following are excerpts from the interview.

UN News Centre: You covered the UN from the outside as a prominent journalist and writer. How did you settle into the role of being an international civil servant?

Edward Mortimer: I don’t think I have any particular strategy for it. I applied for the job out of curiosity, really. I guess that’s a feature of journalists that they are curious. And I wanted to see what the world looked like from this particular vantage point. I was obviously very pleased to be offered the job, but I sort of felt well, they should take me as they find me.

You know [Annan] brought in a number of people from outside into the Secretariat, including at a much higher level than me… And he always said to them, ‘don’t lose that quality of being an outsider’. Because the biggest danger in a way for people working in the Secretariat is that they become part of a bubble and they don’t connect sufficiently with what, for better or worse, is often called ‘the real world’.

So I tried to be myself and obviously there are some constraints involved with being an international civil servant. But I think I wore them fairly lightly, and on the whole, I said what I thought, particularly in internal meetings. And I think that, generally speaking, that was appreciated as being useful.

UN News Centre: How does one become a good speechwriter for the head of the UN?

Edward Mortimer: Well, again, I’m not sure I had a particular formula for that. Although, I would say that if you’re writing speeches for anybody, you need to have an ear. You need to have some sense of how they naturally express themselves. And it’s no good writing something which doesn’t sound right coming from them. And, I think perhaps especially for me, with a sort of partially academic background, and having written sort of relatively high-brow pieces in the Financial Times, I had to simplify my style and pare it down somewhat – long sentences with subordinate clauses don’t work well in speeches.

 

Edward Mortimer monitors the recording by Secretary-General Kofi Annan of the United Nations Day video message in October 2004. UN Photo/Stephenie Hollyman

 

 

It’s partly that, the nature of the spoken word, and partly the personality of the person delivering the speech. Kofi Annan is an extremely intelligent man. I wouldn’t say he’s exactly an intellectual. I think one of his virtues, in a way, is that he likes to express things in a reasonably simple way. So it was important to write short sentences and not too many long words.

UN News Centre: Many of us only experienced Kofi as a measured, soft-spoken person. What kind of man was he behind the calm demeanour? What about humour? What about things that made him angry?

Edward Mortimer: Well I think humour he does have. Perhaps the difference with his predecessor was that his humour is of a benign sort. I think that possibly [Boutros] Boutros-Ghali is the wittier of the two, but there was often a sort of barb to his humour which made him enemies. I think Kofi Annan’s humour is of an inclusive type, it probably made him more friends.

I never heard him raise his voice I think in all the time I was working with him. To a large extent with him, what you see is what you get. I mean, he is a very calm, very centred, careful, considerate person. He expresses irritation more by closing up and saying less. You can tell sometimes that he’s not pleased, but I can’t imagine him shouting at anyone.

UN News Centre: There’s a famous speech from 2003, when Mr. Annan rejected the doctrine that States have the right to use force pre-emptively without the Security Council’s endorsement. Tell us about this so-called ‘fork in the road’.

Edward Mortimer: Well, 2003 was of course the year of the Iraq war, which was probably the most damaging and traumatic thing that the UN went through during those 10 years because you had two permanent members of the Security Council using force, taking military action without the approval of their colleagues in the Council. A massive invasion of a Member State. I think it did great damage to the whole framework of international law and to the credibility of the United Nations. So I think there was a general expectation from other Member States and within the Secretariat that when he came to address the General Assembly that year, the Secretary-General would take some kind of position about this.

I think it was Sir Kieran Prendergast, who was the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs at the time, who probably suggested the phrase that we’d come to a ‘fork in the road’ – meaning that if one went down one track, we would be going towards the sort of anarchic, pre-United Nations world, a world of all against all. And it was important to remind people of the principles of multilateralism so that they took the other route and strengthened international institutions, and particularly the UN, and accepted there are some rules and norms.

And it was in that same speech that he announced the creation of the High-high Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which the following year produced a very important report called A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. It was very much putting across that idea and then making positive suggestions for how the UN could be strengthened, many of which were taken up by Kofi Annan in his In Larger Freedom report in March 2005, and some found their way into the outcome document of the World Summit in September of that year.

UN News Centre: Mr. Annan also delivered a now famous speech on intervention. Can you tell us a little bit about how this came about?

Edward Mortimer: Well, he delivered more than one. I think the first speech that I wrote for him actually, shortly before I took up my position in New York, was for the Ditchley Foundation in the United Kingdom. And he chose the theme of intervention for that. Of course this was not very long after the tragedies in Bosnia and in Rwanda. It was an opportunity for him to reflect on those and to really suggest that there are some limits to the sovereignty of States, or at least that sovereignty is not a kind of blank check which entitles you to massacre your fellow citizens.

There was after all a history of humanitarian intervention going back to the 1970s: India’s intervention in East Pakistan which gave rise to the creation of Bangladesh; Viet Nam’s intervention in Cambodia which put an end to the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge; and about the same time, Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda which deposed Idi Amin. Even though I think there were always sort of qualms about the legality of these actions, there was a general feeling afterwards that it had been necessary and right and that somebody had to do that. So although the phrase ‘responsibility to protect’ was only coined a few years after that, I think the germ of the idea was very much in that speech.

UN News Centre: If you were to handle the oil-for-food crisis today as communications director, would you do anything differently?

Edward Mortimer: Well, it was very difficult. I mean I think that our handling of it perhaps did improve and we did learn some things in the course of that really rather stressful period. I think the most important insight really, and advice, we got was from Mark Malloch Brown, who at the beginning of that was the Administrator of UNDP [UN Development Programme]. I remember him coming to a meeting on the 38th floor – and of course he had experience of political consultancy and public relations in the private sector before he joined the UN system. And he said there’s one very important recipe in a situation like this which is that you have to change the conversation.

In other words, although of course we had to answer the specific charges against us, we also had to have something positive to say. And I mean I think we did have something positive to say anyway because there was the process which we just alluded to of the High-level Panel and its report which was about to come out and the plans for a summit to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals which was going to happen in 2005.

But I think Mark encouraged us to see that as our main talking point, and not let ourselves get completely bogged down in the oil-for-food issue. At the beginning of 2005, he came across the street and actually became the Chef de Cabinet for the Secretary-General. So then he sort of took charge of this operation. But the idea was already there before that.

UN News Centre: It’s been said that Kofi Annan was an excellent diplomat and a public speaker but a poor manager. Do you think he did enough to reform the UN and what do you consider to be his most significant legacy?

Edward Mortimer: Well, I think in some respects he’s quite a good manager. I mean he has great mastery of detail. He had an unrivalled knowledge of the UN machine and how it worked because he’d held so many management jobs in different parts of it before he became Secretary-General. And that’s an advantage which I think is unique among Secretaries-General of having had that. So he was quite good at getting things done, knowing who to task with a specific assignment.

 

Secretary-General Annan (left) going over his speech on UN support to the Iraqi People with Edward Mortimer (2nd from left) and other communications staff in March 2003. UN Photo/Stephenie Hollyman

 

 

He was a very good diplomat because he was very good at putting people at their ease and making them feel that he understood them and that he was, in some sense, on their side. He hated confrontation. And of course sometimes, in a management situation, you have to take tough decisions and tell people things that they really don’t want to hear. Sometimes you even have to fire people – I’m not saying you should do that all the time, but occasionally it is necessary. I think he shrank from that. And that was another point where it was very important when Mark Malloch Brown came on board as Chef de Cabinet because he didn’t shrink from that at all, and I think often it is the role of the Chef de Cabinet to sort of take the flak for the more unpopular decisions that a Secretary-General sometimes has to make. So, he certainly wasn’t a perfect manager. I think he had strengths and weaknesses.

Reform, you know, is a kind of never-ending story. I think people started talking about reform of the UN very few years after its creation. And they probably will be talking about reform of the UN in a hundred years’ time if there’s any human society left and any UN left, which I hope there will be. One of the phrases I remember that was around when I arrived in 1998 was that “reform is a process not an event’. It was a phrase I remember being warned not to put in the Secretary-General’s speeches because it was unpopular with many of the membership. But unfortunately, the reason why it’s unpopular is that many of the membership don’t want reform. They’re comfortable with the way things are happening. So I think it’s a big challenge for every Secretary-General.

I think it’s always possible to improve, and the improvements will usually be incremental rather than spectacular. And new people who come into a job almost always are the victim of exaggerated expectations. They have a brief honeymoon, particularly with the media, but sometimes also with the membership, and then after a bit – either because they’re reforming too much or because they’re reforming too little – people get fed up and start to carp and criticize, and that will be the same I suspect for every Secretary-General.

I think the important legacy, which of course is not entirely personal to him but I think he understood it and articulated it, is that the international system is no longer simply a system of States. That’s why the Millennium Report was called We the Peoples

and that’s why this book is called We the Peoples. Because what Kofi Annan was really about was trying to remind everybody that this Organization doesn’t just belong to the governments. It belongs to the peoples of the world and only if they are engaged – not simply represented by States, but actively engaged and caring about what it does and how it works… that can give a very important dimension to the UN, which I think governments alone can never do. So I would say that that understanding, which was something that was in a way there already, but which he really put the spotlight on, is probably his most important legacy.

UN News Centre: The process of selecting the Secretary-General is critical, but pretty much shrouded in secrecy. Member States are the ones who choose the world’s top diplomat. Any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council has the ability to block a candidate. What do you think needs to change in how a Secretary-General is chosen?

Edward Mortimer: I think there has got to be a more transparent and more inclusive process. I see the possibility for change in this area as being considerable, and it’s actually a lot easier than it is for example to reform the composition of the Security Council, which is another thing that many people would like to do. But with the Security Council, it’s very difficult to change it without amending the [UN] Charter and amending the Charter is a very complicated and difficult process.

With the Secretary-General, the Charter is actually remarkably laconic. It simply says that the Secretary-General should be appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. The General Assembly itself decided in 1946 that it only wanted one name from the Security Council. I don’t see that there’s anything to stop it from saying to the Security Council, as the Secretary-General often says to Member States when they are proposing candidates for jobs in the Secretariat or to head a fund or programme of the United Nations, please give me a choice.

 

Edward Mortimer (left) speaks at a lecture held at UN Headquarters in New York in 2003 to mark the centenary birth of UN diplomat and Noble Laureate Ralph Bunche. UN Photo/Mark Garten

 

 

I think also it doesn’t say in the Charter that the Secretary-General should serve any particular term of years, or whether he or she should be re-eligible. I think there’s a lot to be said for, instead of having a renewable five-year term, a non-renewable seven-year term so that the Secretary-General can then get on with the job without the constant suspicion that he’s currying favour with the great powers in order to try to ensure his re-election.

I think there should be hearings in the General Assembly, but open to the public, where the candidates could be interviewed and asked about their programme. I think that all the members taking part in this process, and including the five permanent members [of the Security Council], should state clearly what their criteria are, what they think is the desirable set of qualifications for somebody doing this very important job. There should probably be a search committee. It’s not necessarily the person who proposed himself for this job who will be the best choice.

So I think there are many ways in which this process can be improved and even the non-permanent members of the Security Council, given that you need nine votes, if they got together, they could also lay down some conditions and criteria, rather than letting the permanent five call the shots. So I think there’s something for everybody to do here to change this process and ensure that we really look for the best person – whatever their gender, whatever their nationality – who will do the best job for the world. This is a unique job and it’s an enormous responsibility. And the world needs to find the best person to do that job.

UN News Centre: Is a book about the United Nations among your future plans?

Edward Mortimer: Well, it was among my plans and I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t done it. I can’t say I got much encouragement from publishers who seem to believe that there is no market for books about the UN. But maybe I’ll come back to it. There are things, good stories from my time at the UN, which maybe now one could tell without upsetting too many people. So I hope I will come back to it.