Surakiart Sathirathai: Not all’s fair?

New York, July 7: The UN, believe it or not, has lost the nomination papers of one of the candidates to succeed Kofi Annan as secretary-general of the world body.

As a result, when the president of the Security Council, France’s UN ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, held his first news conference here this week after assuming the presidency, he mentioned only three candidates in the fray.

Among these three is India’s Shashi Tharoor, whose nomination was formally presented to the presidents of the Security Council and the General Assembly by India’s UN ambassador Nirupam Sen on Wednesday.

The irony is that Surakiart Sathirathai, Thailand’s deputy Prime Minister, who is at the moment technically out of the contest because of this faux pas, was the first to enter the race.

According to UN diplomats, his nomination was submi-tted two years ago by Laos, which was then holding the presidency of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean). Sathirathai is a common candidate of the 10-member Asean.

No one at the UN was thinking much about Annan’s successor way back in 2004 and it appears that the nomination was filed away somewhere in the vast UN bureaucratic hole. No one is able to trace it now.

Sathirathai, for his part, was campaigning elsewhere this week on the assumption that all is well with his candidature until it became obvious from Sabli?re’s news conference that he was not a candidate after all.

All is not lost for the Thai candidate, however. His government can still bring him back into the race by sending letters to the presidents of the Security Council and the General Assembly.

But it is a bad start for the man as the Security Council next week begins the formal process of choosing Annan’s successor.

And it is particularly so because Sathirathai was once considered the front runner.

His campaign has run into serious trouble, though, after India announced that it would nominate Tharoor for the job. Within hours of New Delhi’s announcement of Tharoor’s nomination, a former Thai foreign minister, Surapong Jayanama, questioned Bangkok’s claim that Sathirathai had the backing of 130 UN members, including India.

“The countries that eventually announced their candidates had the courtesy to refrain from arguing the Thai claim. So the Thai government is fooling itself and the entire nation that these countries have backed our candidate,” Jayanama was quoted in the Thai media.

Jayanama belongs to a powerful Thai family of diplomats: his brother is a former Thai ambassador to the UN and another relative was ambassador in Tokyo during World War II.

Sathirathai further complicated his campaign by filing a defamation case against Asda Jayanama, the former envoy to the UN, who called him a “third rate politician”.

India has been dragged into this public spat with Jayanama alleging that Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s two state visits to New Delhi were to strike a satellite deal for a company owned by the Prime Minister’s family.