New leadership at the U.N.

UNITED NATIONS — The world has no sure idea of what it may be getting with its new United Nations secretary-general designate. Ban Ki-Moon, the former South Korean foreign minister, is more or less an enigma except to a very small population of the globe daily engaged in international diplomacy.

In a real sense, Ban Ki-Moon is the world's most prominent diplomat that almost nobody knows.

What's more, there is another, quite different population that could not care less about the character and talent of the incoming U.N. secretary-general. For it has long ago given up any hope in the utility and relevance of this world organization that was forged together in the shattered aftermath of the Second World War.

The latter is the group that would prefer to convert the iconic U.N. secretariat building on the East River of Manhattan into something like a large used-furniture warehouse.Fiery letters to the editor of the New York Post last week said it all, not only about the institution but about its outgoing leader, Kofi Annan: "corrupt and shameful," " Good riddance, Annan," "a complete failure during his tenure."

Indeed, Annan, a majestic-looking man, is not stepping down so much on a high note as on an ominously low one. Even the member-state delegates who rose to their feet in the cavernous General Assembly hall to offer Annan his last standing ovation knew in their hearts that the U.N. is in very serious trouble.

Annan isn't wholly to blame, but it was on his 10-year watch as U.N. chief that Darfur deteriorated into a contemporary holocaust meltdown, that the people of Bosnia were driven to hell and back and that his relatives became implicated in money scandals arising from the controversial oil-for-food program in Iraq.

And so when Annan's chosen successor rose from his seat in the VIP section to the side of the General Assembly hall to stride to the central podium for his oath of office, everyone in the room focused on this slightly built and quiet-spoken diplomat as if he were one very improbable superman.

And that he may be: History may perhaps show that this South Korean was not just the first from his country to garner this top post but the last of its occupants about whom anyone will really care. For if Ban proves to be one big bust, as Annan's scandal-plagued second term rather turned out to be, it is hard to see this organization going anywhere except down into the muddy waters of the East River as if in a slow but irrevocable sink.

Against such broad pessimism, though, can be placed a pair of generally positive facts:

The first is that Ban himself would appear to be a model of integrity and trustworthiness. Throughout his many decades as a diplomat, nothing has surfaced to suggest that he is anything but a Boy Scout armed with a Harvard degree. Before this column endorsed him for this job over the summer, it sought negative opinions about his professionalism and talent, even from diplomats thought to be equally qualified candidates for the job he was to win. We could find no one who did not like and admire Ban.

Moreover, if hard work can work miracles, then the world may have found its U.N. miracle worker in Ban. He is a tireless workaholic who can inspire colleagues to comparable fatigue; he is a pragmatist, a listener and a careful sorter of different options. He would more likely listen than declaim, would rather understand than denounce, and would prefer to look you in the eye so as to see into your soul than glad-hand you in a flurry of utterly meaningless and phony gestures.

His style is not that of the promiser but of the doer. Few may now believe that he will be able to orchestrate significant reform of the U.N. — but then again, no one thought he'd be able to reform the tradition-landed Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea.

Ban, we will see, is no showboat; he is the working man's diplomat. No one will lionize him for his charismatic appearance and showboating wife. But for all this, paradoxically, Ban over the long run will benefit from the current, unkind comparisons to his predecessor.

His main advantage? That he is a Ban, not an Annan.

One New York letter-writer put it this way: "People all over the world will be celebrating that Annan is finally out. Anyone could do a better job than he did."

Ban is anything but just "anyone."

UCLA professor Tom Plate is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.