The United Nations Security Council approved South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon to be the world body’s eighth secretary-general in a formal vote in New York, Japanese Ambassador Kenzo Oshima said.
Under the U.N. Charter, the 15-member Security Council makes a recommendation for the next secretary-general to the 192-member General Assembly, which must give final approval.
Ban would take office Jan. 1, succeeding Kofi Annan, 68, of Ghana. He would serve a five-year term, Oshima told reporters at the UN.
As Annan’s successor, Ban would inherit an institution with 9,000 workers, $5 billion in annual spending, 16 peacekeeping missions and a public image dented by a series of corruption scandals.
Ban, 62, won all four informal “straw polls” in the 15- county council. His name will now be sent to the General Assembly for ratification. That body, consisting of all 192 UN members, is scheduled to take action on Ban within a month.
The Security Council vote came the same day North Korea reported carrying out a nuclear test, days after the UN warned the isolated, totalitarian state to desist from such a threat. Ban has said he would like to help mediate the North Korea crisis.
‘Appropriate Juxtaposition’
“Its quite an appropriate juxtaposition that today, 61 years after the temporary division of the Korean Peninsula after World War II, that we’re electing the foreign minister of South Korea as secretary-general of this organization, and meeting as well to consider the testing by the North Koreans of a nuclear device,” U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said.
“I can’t think of a better way to show the difference in progress of those two countries,” he said.
Ban defeated six other candidates in the four straw polls, including UN Undersecretary-General Shashi Tharoor, 50, of India; Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, 47; Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, Jordan’s 42-year-old ambassador to the UN; Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, 69; and, former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani, 57.
Ban has headed South Korea’s foreign ministry since January 2004. He previously served as President Roh Moo Hyun’s foreign policy adviser and before that as South Korea’s ambassador to the UN in 2001 and to Austria in 1998.
