DHAKA: António Guterres was formally nominated by the UN Security Council as the organization’s 9th Secretary General.
In the coming days his name will be given to the 193-member General Assembly for formal approval.
Guterres, who was prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, will be the first national leader to take the role as the world’s top diplomat. But there will be no honeymoon period for 63-year-old former U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), reports the Time.com.
Come January, when he formally takes over from the departing Ban Ki-Moon, Guterres will lead the U.N. through the maelstrom of regional conflicts, including global rise in terrorism, a painful Syrian war, the international refugee crisis and an ever-growing gulf between Russia and the West.
The surprising ease of Guterres’s selection offers some hope that he may have more luck in office than Ban. The announcement from the Security Council, bitterly divided over a solution to Syria, came sooner than expected—most secretary general elections tend to last until early November.
After Guterres won the unanimous backing of the Council in a Wednesday straw poll, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Samantha Powers remarked on this rare show of unity: “I think every day we go into the Security Council, we aspire for the kind of unity that we saw today, and on a crisis with carnage as horrific as that in Syria, the urgency of achieving that unity is no secret to anyone. And it’s not something we’ve achieved up to this point.”
This may be in part to Guterres reputation of being an effective leader within the U.N., having served as UNHCR for close to 11 years, says Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the U.N. Foundation— an NGO started by Ted Turner to support U.N. causes.
Guterres has a raft of internal issues at the U.N. to deal with, along with his responsibilities as the world’s top diplomat. The U.N. secretariat he will run includes some 40,000 people, and is frequently accused of of being bloated and bureaucratic.
BDST: 1707 HRS, OCT 07, 2016
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