A woman to lead UN?

Women are indeed the flavor of the season world over. Right from the probability of USA getting its first woman President ever, the United Nations too is looking very hard at a woman General Secretary.

The current Secretary-General , Ban Ki-moon steps down by Dec’16 and he himself has urged women candidates to apply. This top post is elected by the five permanent members of the Security Council — the U.K., the U.S., Russia, China, and France.

Till date, just like there has never been a woman Secretary-General, there has never been a Muslim or a Hindu elected and those in the UN have this time, in a survey, said that the UN chief needs to be have more diversity, look beyond race and religion.  The Elders’, a group of international statesmen formed by Nelson Mandela, and including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, South African archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, have proposed that three names be submitted instead of one, and that future Secretaries-General serve a seven-year term instead of being eligible for re-election after their first five-year term.

There is so much politics in the UN and as The Hindu rightly puts it - in all likelihood that the successful candidate will be the result of backstairs bargaining between the U.S. and Russia, and the new Secretary-General may well be a result of compromise — one who is not well known outside diplomatic circles, and who has not alienated any of the big powers with his or her past actions. For the same reason, the Permanent Five will not favour any person who has a high-profile or a forceful personality.

The candidates so far include five women: Irina Bokova, the Bulgarian Director-General of UNESCO; Helen Clark, New Zealand’s former Prime Minister and Administrator of the UNDP; Natalia Gherman, former Deputy Prime Minister of Moldova; Susana Malcorra, Foreign Minister of Argentina; and Vesna Pusic, a former Croatian Foreign Minister. The male candidates are Antonio Guterres, former Portugese Prime Minister and the 10th UN High Commissioner for Refugees; Srgjan Kerim, Foreign Minister of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; Miroslav Lajèák, Slovak Foreign Minister; Igor Lukšiæ, former Prime Minister of Montenegro; and Danilo Türk, former President of Slovenia.