Tharoor: Tough job

New York, June 16: The campaign for the first Indian bid for the post of UN secretary-general has begun in earnest here even as the possibility emerged yesterday that Shashi Tharoor may face a rival, who was born in India.

Pakistan is trying to persuade Nafis Sadik, who was born in Jaunpur, near Varanasi, to be its candidate to rival India’s unexpected formal nomination of Tharoor.

Sadik is the special adviser to the UN secretary-general as well as the secretary-general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific. She is also a member of the secretary-general’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

When Sadik was appointed executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in 1987, she became the first woman in the UN’s history to lead one of its major voluntarily funded programmes.

She had the rank of undersecretary-general, the same position that Tharoor has in the UN system now.

Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN, Munir Akram, indicated at a news conference here yesterday that his country was considering the nomination of a candidate to succeed Kofi Annan.

Diplomats of Muslim countries at the UN said Akram would like to be that candidate, but tactically, he had proposed to Islamabad that Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz should enter the fray.

Aziz, who is disinclined to do so, is said to have suggested to Pervez Musharraf that Sadik, an old friend from his days in New York as a banker, should be Pakistan’s choice.

As developments surrounding the selection of Annan’s successor gathers pace here, it has turned out that India’s campaign on behalf of Tharoor actually began at UN headquarters even before his candidature was officially announced in New Delhi yesterday.

On Wednesday, India’s permanent representative to the UN, Nirupam Sen, told the 116-member co-ordinating bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in New York that Delhi was moving towards nominating Tharoor as its candidate to succeed Annan on January 1, 2007.

According to diplomats from a large cross-section of countries which attended that meeting, NAM members appreciated Sen’s gesture in taking them into confidence ahead of the next day’s formal announcement in New Delhi.

Sen’s strategy was crucial because the NAM meeting had been called precisely to discuss the process of selecting the next secretary-general.

The UN’s single biggest group wants a decisive say in this process. Many NAM members believe the Security Council has hijacked the process and has been choosing chief executives of the world body without adequate consultations among members of the General Assembly.

Sen anticipated yesterday that Tharoor would begin his official campaign by meeting permanent members of the Security Council to present his vision on where he would lead the UN if he was chosen to succeed Annan.

He would then have to repeat the exercise with regional groups of UN members like the Asian group, the Africa group and so on.

This would have to be facilitated by the president of the General Assembly.

At the same time, Indian diplomatic missions across the world would lobby with governments in support of the Indian candidate.

Sen rejected Pakistan’s contention that by nominating Tharoor, India had given up its efforts to become a permanent member of the Security Council.

That effort would continue on parallel lines, he said, pointing out that the General Assembly was all set to debate the expansion of the council at the end of this month.