Kim deals another blow to nuclear non-proliferation
Kim deals another blow to nuclear non-proliferation
By Quentin Peel and Daniel Dombey
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: October 9 2006 19:05 | Last updated: October 9 2006 19:05
Monday’s claim by North Korea to have successfully detonated an underground nuclear explosion has escalated fears of a destructive new arms race in east Asia, and dealt a potentially devastating blow to hopes of preventing a new round of nuclear proliferation around the globe.
The country regarded as the world’s most secretive and unpredictable communist dictatorship called the bluff of the international community by carrying out the test less than a week after it had announced its plan, and in the face of virtually unanimous condemnation.
Although international scientists have yet to confirm that it was a genuine nuclear test – and some scientists suggested yesterday that the explosion had fizzled out – governments from Washington to Tokyo, Beijing and Moscow are assuming the worst.
At stake is the survival of the arms control system that has restrained the number of nuclear-armed states for almost 40 years, but which has looked increasingly fragile for the past decade. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the guardian of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, said the test amounted to “the breaking of a de facto global moratorium on nuclear explosive testing that has been in place for nearly a decade”.
North Korea’s decision to demonstrate its own nuclear capacity represents a deliberate flouting not only of the US administration, which has threatened dire consequences, but also of China and Russia, its two nuclear neighbours. It also amounts to a calculated challenge to non-nuclear Japan, the country that sees itself as the most obvious target of any North Korean attack. Shinzo Abe, the new Japanese prime minister, landed in neighbouring South Korea for an official visit at the precise moment that Pyongyang announced its test.
The decision amounts to the second and most dramatic setback to international efforts to contain proliferation in recent days, after Iran’s refusal to suspend its own nuclear fuel enrichment plans to negotiate a diplomatic solution with the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council. Yet the North Korean move was both predicted and predictable.
“Everything has changed, and nothing has changed,” says Gareth Evans, chief executive of the International Crisis Group, and former Australian foreign minister. “We have to confront overtly the weaponisation of North Korea. But this has been a reality for several years.”
Japan and the US are the most hawkish members of the international community. Japan’s response may determine whether the North Korean action precipitates a regional arms race. China, on the other hand, as Pyongyang’s closest partner, holds the key to persuasion by more peaceful means.
“The US and Japan will go back to the UN Security Council to press for follow-on resolutions authorising political and economic sanctions,” according to Bruce Klingner, of the Eurasia group. He says Tokyo would certainly participate in any multilateral sanctions or other non-military response.
“The critical policy now is to ensure that things don’t get any worse,” says Mr Evans. “Japan’s reaction is the key.”
Last month, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan’s former prime minister, argued his country should consider developing nuclear weapons. “There are countries with nuclear weapons in Japan’s vicinity,” he said. “We are currently dependent on US nuclear weapons [as a deterrent], but it is not necessarily known whether the US attitude will continue.”
Mr Nakasone set out his argument, thought to be shared by some officials in South Korea – and possibly in Taiwan as well – as a last resort, only to be enacted if the world’s non- proliferation regime fell apart.
“Today’s events certainly heighten tension and spur on those in Japan who believe that Japan should consider its own nuclear weapons option, but that is still a minority view and will remain so as long as Japan feels that it is protected by the US umbrella,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a non-proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
“The bigger impact will be on non-proliferation worldwide, on countries that want to have the prestige or deterrent effect they believe nuclear weapons create... This will increase the number of countries that want to consider those options.”
China and Russia, as well as South Korea, are all expected to be cautious about imposing draconian sanctions, not least because of their fears of precipitating a chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime and a humanitarian disaster.
Mr Klingner says: “The Chinese leadership is more willing to confront Pyongyang, but remains hesitant to take actions that could trigger further North Korean escalatory behaviour, or threatens regime collapse.”
But the lessons of North Korea are not limited to east Asia. The threats of nuclear arms proliferation are rapidly rising in the Middle East as well, and several states – including Iran and Libya – have had black-market nuclear dealings with Pyongyang.
“The message out of Iraq is that if you don’t have nuclear weapons you get invaded, if you do have nuclear weapons, you don’t get invaded,” Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state, told the FT in an interview this year. She said the message was hammered home by President George W. Bush’s decision to link Iraq, Iran and North Korea together in the “axis of evil”.
The Bush administration furiously disputes the claim that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions – which the Clinton administration also sought to deal with in the 1990s – were heightened by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But today’s combustible Middle East has become a part of the world where many countries appear to be seeking the option of developing nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iran, whose covert nuclear activities were uncovered in 2002, has stepped up its programme this year, defying a UN demand for it to cease uranium enrichment – a process that can generate weapons grade material. Although Tehran insists its purposes are purely peaceful, the US and the European Union fear it is moving closer to developing nuclear weapons.
Turkey and Egypt both recently announced plans to construct nuclear plants. Despite official denials, they have been seen as keeping open their nuclear options.
“There’s a strategic component to Egypt’s nuclear power programme as there is with Turkey’s expansion of its nuclear power,” says Mr Fitzpatrick, who calls it “a nuclear hedge if Iran acquires nuclear weapons.”
The wider concern is that the North Korean bomb could prove the final straw for the world’s non-proliferation regime as a whole, enshrined by the 1968 NPT. That treaty offered a deal in which nuclear weapon states would “pursue negotiations in good faith” on nuclear disarmament, while other states would abstain from achieving nuclear weapons capability.
“The addition of a new state with nuclear weapon capacity is a clear setback to international commitments to move towards nuclear disarmament,” Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, said yesterday.
Flaws have been in the system from the start: Israel, a de facto nuclear state for at least 30 years, has never signed the treaty; nor have India and Pakistan. Nevertheless, the NPT has helped prevent – so far – what US President John F. Kennedy feared when he spoke in 1963 of “a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons”.
Over the last decade, however, the cracks have widened: India and Pakistan carried out high-profile nuclear tests in 1998, without long-term consequences in terms of sanctions. North Korea itself announced its withdrawal from the NPT in 2003. The US has set up programmes to look at modernising its nuclear arsenal. A UN conference held last year to update the treaty and deal with such flaws collapsed and Mr ElBaradei blames the superpowers for failing to take more action on disarmament in recent years.
Yesterday he reinforced his call for a legally binding universal ban on nuclear testing through the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a treaty the US has balked at ratifying. He and Kofi Annan, outgoing UN secretary-general, also want a fissile cut-off treaty, which would reduce the amount of material that could be used for nuclear weapons.
Mr ElBaradei and his sympathisers do not argue that such steps would do much to discourage North Korea from proceeding with its weapons plans; they do, however, believe that they could help shore up an international non-proliferation system.
Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Kennedy school of government at Harvard University, says that the world’s leadership could learn much from the response of President Lyndon Johnson to China’s own nuclear test explosion in 1964. On that occasion, Beijing was seen by many in the west as a chilling addition to the nuclear club.
But Mr Lewis says President Johnson struck the right note by stressing the US commitment to Asia, and also that it retained – as it does today – an overwhelming advantage in conventional and non-conventional forces.
He adds that the US should make clear to countries such as Japan, South Korea, Egypt and Turkey that their membership of the nuclear club is out of the question. “If the US remains committed to the non-proliferation regime, it is within the power of the US to continue to maintain that regime even in spite of a North Korean test,” he says. “If the US chooses to give up the regime because of the test, then the regime is dead . . . We do have choices after all.”
Relentless pursuit brings a challenge close to home
Even before he was nominated formally as United Nations secretary-general on Monday, Ban Ki-moon was thrown in at the deep end of a crisis that is likely to dominate his agenda for the foreseeable future, writes Anna Fifield in Seoul.
As South Korea’s foreign minister, few people are as well versed in the intricacies of the North Korea nuclear situation as he. And as incoming secretary-general, few will have the scope to influence how the crisis of Pyongyang’s new nuclear capability is managed. It is fair to say that his tenure at the UN secretariat will be judged largely on how he handles this issue above all others.
Mr Ban on Monday stressed South Korea “will be firm and resolute in adhering to the principle of no tolerance for a nuclear North Korea...we will seek firm and strong measures so as to get North Korea to abandon all of its nuclear weapons and related programmes”.
He last week told the Financial Times that he would make North Korea the priority of his tenure at the UN. He added he would like to travel to Pyongyang, something his predecessor Kofi Annan never had a chance to do in 10 years in the post.
That approach echoes the moderate policy of South Korea, which has promoted almost unconditional economic engagement with the North – often at variance with US strategy and that of the Japanese, who will no doubt call for strong punitive measures against Pyongyang.
Mr Ban will come under intense scrutiny from sceptics who do not believe he is tough enough for the demanding job. But while he has been described in the west as gentle and not very forceful, he is known in Korea for a low-key but relentless style which is credited, among other accomplishments, with getting him the current post at the UN. He was nominated formally yesterday by the Security Council, with confirmation by the General Assembly a near certainty.
At the time he announced his candidacy – in February, long before anyone else – he was not considered a particularly serious contender. The general consensus was that a more forceful candidate would emerge.
But Mr Ban pursued his campaign behind the scenes. In the first straw poll held in the Security Council last month, the unexpected degree of support for the unflashy, softly-spoken South Korean – the first Asian to hold the post since U Thant of Burma between 1961 and 1971 – raised suspicions.
Competitors accused him of cutting back-room deals when Kang Kyung-wha, a senior South Korean diplomat and one of Mr Ban’s campaign managers, was appointed UN deputy high commissioner for human rights. This was followed by allegations of votes-for-jobs trading with Britain. Mr Ban was accused of buying votes with development aid to Africa, by cutting a generous trade deal with Greece and even giving pianos to Peru.
Mr Ban vehemently denies any impropriety, saying: “I’m a man of integrity”.
But the South Korean, who in person is charming and quick to smile, admits he is “annoyed” by the suggestion he suffers from a charisma deficit. “This is my style – I respect others before putting myself forward,” he says, adding that in Asian culture, such modesty is considered a real virtue.
“Don’t make the story too much about me – I’m not used to all this attention,” Mr Ban whispered in the garden outside his official residence in Seoul, after speaking to the FT for this profile.
His dedication to the job is legendary, even in workaholic Korea. As minister, his schedule is broken down into five-minute blocks. He sleeps for five hours a night and claims never to have been late to work in his life. In the 33 months that he has been foreign minister – an eternity in South Korean politics – he has taken only a couple of days off, for his youngest daughter’s wedding.
Korean diplomats say Mr Ban, in contrast to some of his predecessors, has tackled policy and process with equal vigour.
These traits and his tendency towards diplomatese have led to the impression that the incoming secretary-general is too gentle and consensus-minded. The US’s support for his candidacy has also created an impression that Washington sees Mr Ban as someone they can easily influence.
But the 62-year-old, who has traversed war and poverty to become head of one of the world’s largest institutions, says he should not be underestimated: “I might look soft on the outside but I’m a man of strong inner strength – otherwise I could not have done all that I have.”
Joseph Nye, who was one of Mr Ban’s professors while he completed a masters in public administration at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1985, says the Korean has “a rare combination of analytic clarity, humility and perseverance”.
The oldest of five children, Mr Ban was born in the tiny village of Umsong in 1944, the year before Korea was liberated from Japanese occupation. After liberation, the peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel, the north under Soviet protection and the south under the US.
But shortly after his sixth birthday, North Korean communist forces invaded, triggering three years of war that devastated South Korea and led to widespread poverty.
“During the war, my family moved to a small, very remote village under a mountaintop that even soldiers couldn’t find,” Mr Ban told the FT, leaning back into a white armchair in his spacious house.
Surrounded by American soldiers in the aftermath of the war, the teenager started teaching himself English, and won a competition for a Red Cross-sponsored grant to travel to the US for a few months in 1962. He still fondly recalls his stay in San Francisco, and last year even invited his now 88-year-old hostess, “Mrs Patterson” to visit Seoul, where she was feted like a long-lost American relative.
In Washington, on the same trip, he met President John F. Kennedy, an event that sparked his desire to be a diplomat. “It fits my character – I’m always making lots of friends and I’m sociable,” Mr Ban says. “On the official side, we are a divided country, we lack natural resources, we are overpopulated and we have security problems – so it’s diplomacy that can really defend Korea.” Having seen his own country transformed from a poor, war-ravaged nation into the world’s 10th-largest economy, famous for its advanced technology, he says he sees potential rather than despair in developing countries.
After studying international relations at Seoul National University, he sat the foreign service exam – receiving the top score – and became a diplomat in 1970. Starting in India, his career has spanned the world, including three previous tours at the UN and a stint as ambassador in Vienna, where he learnt to waltz. “I have two left feet” he confided.
His one slip followed a visit of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, in 2001, when the media reported South Korea was edging closer to Russia and away from the US. Mr Ban was fired. “I had 45 days as a private citizen and that was a very difficult time for me – I couldn’t sleep for two weeks,” he says.
But the episode turned out to help Mr Ban in his bid to become secretary-general. He was sent to New York as the chef de cabinet for Han Seung-soo, the former South Korean foreign minister who became president of the UN general assembly in 2001. Mr Han speaks glowingly of Mr Ban: “I am sure he will exercise wise leadership at the UN.”
One diplomat in Seoul who has worked under Mr Ban for 25 years says: “There has been a sense of security under Ban Ki-moon because he has such credibility and because he has not shied away from his administrative duties in favour of policy, he is in charge from A to Z.”
By Quentin Peel and Daniel Dombey
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: October 9 2006 19:05 | Last updated: October 9 2006 19:05
Monday’s claim by North Korea to have successfully detonated an underground nuclear explosion has escalated fears of a destructive new arms race in east Asia, and dealt a potentially devastating blow to hopes of preventing a new round of nuclear proliferation around the globe.
The country regarded as the world’s most secretive and unpredictable communist dictatorship called the bluff of the international community by carrying out the test less than a week after it had announced its plan, and in the face of virtually unanimous condemnation.
Although international scientists have yet to confirm that it was a genuine nuclear test – and some scientists suggested yesterday that the explosion had fizzled out – governments from Washington to Tokyo, Beijing and Moscow are assuming the worst.
At stake is the survival of the arms control system that has restrained the number of nuclear-armed states for almost 40 years, but which has looked increasingly fragile for the past decade. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the guardian of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, said the test amounted to “the breaking of a de facto global moratorium on nuclear explosive testing that has been in place for nearly a decade”.
North Korea’s decision to demonstrate its own nuclear capacity represents a deliberate flouting not only of the US administration, which has threatened dire consequences, but also of China and Russia, its two nuclear neighbours. It also amounts to a calculated challenge to non-nuclear Japan, the country that sees itself as the most obvious target of any North Korean attack. Shinzo Abe, the new Japanese prime minister, landed in neighbouring South Korea for an official visit at the precise moment that Pyongyang announced its test.
The decision amounts to the second and most dramatic setback to international efforts to contain proliferation in recent days, after Iran’s refusal to suspend its own nuclear fuel enrichment plans to negotiate a diplomatic solution with the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council. Yet the North Korean move was both predicted and predictable.
“Everything has changed, and nothing has changed,” says Gareth Evans, chief executive of the International Crisis Group, and former Australian foreign minister. “We have to confront overtly the weaponisation of North Korea. But this has been a reality for several years.”
Japan and the US are the most hawkish members of the international community. Japan’s response may determine whether the North Korean action precipitates a regional arms race. China, on the other hand, as Pyongyang’s closest partner, holds the key to persuasion by more peaceful means.
“The US and Japan will go back to the UN Security Council to press for follow-on resolutions authorising political and economic sanctions,” according to Bruce Klingner, of the Eurasia group. He says Tokyo would certainly participate in any multilateral sanctions or other non-military response.
“The critical policy now is to ensure that things don’t get any worse,” says Mr Evans. “Japan’s reaction is the key.”
Last month, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan’s former prime minister, argued his country should consider developing nuclear weapons. “There are countries with nuclear weapons in Japan’s vicinity,” he said. “We are currently dependent on US nuclear weapons [as a deterrent], but it is not necessarily known whether the US attitude will continue.”
Mr Nakasone set out his argument, thought to be shared by some officials in South Korea – and possibly in Taiwan as well – as a last resort, only to be enacted if the world’s non- proliferation regime fell apart.
“Today’s events certainly heighten tension and spur on those in Japan who believe that Japan should consider its own nuclear weapons option, but that is still a minority view and will remain so as long as Japan feels that it is protected by the US umbrella,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a non-proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
“The bigger impact will be on non-proliferation worldwide, on countries that want to have the prestige or deterrent effect they believe nuclear weapons create... This will increase the number of countries that want to consider those options.”
China and Russia, as well as South Korea, are all expected to be cautious about imposing draconian sanctions, not least because of their fears of precipitating a chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime and a humanitarian disaster.
Mr Klingner says: “The Chinese leadership is more willing to confront Pyongyang, but remains hesitant to take actions that could trigger further North Korean escalatory behaviour, or threatens regime collapse.”
But the lessons of North Korea are not limited to east Asia. The threats of nuclear arms proliferation are rapidly rising in the Middle East as well, and several states – including Iran and Libya – have had black-market nuclear dealings with Pyongyang.
“The message out of Iraq is that if you don’t have nuclear weapons you get invaded, if you do have nuclear weapons, you don’t get invaded,” Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state, told the FT in an interview this year. She said the message was hammered home by President George W. Bush’s decision to link Iraq, Iran and North Korea together in the “axis of evil”.
The Bush administration furiously disputes the claim that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions – which the Clinton administration also sought to deal with in the 1990s – were heightened by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But today’s combustible Middle East has become a part of the world where many countries appear to be seeking the option of developing nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iran, whose covert nuclear activities were uncovered in 2002, has stepped up its programme this year, defying a UN demand for it to cease uranium enrichment – a process that can generate weapons grade material. Although Tehran insists its purposes are purely peaceful, the US and the European Union fear it is moving closer to developing nuclear weapons.
Turkey and Egypt both recently announced plans to construct nuclear plants. Despite official denials, they have been seen as keeping open their nuclear options.
“There’s a strategic component to Egypt’s nuclear power programme as there is with Turkey’s expansion of its nuclear power,” says Mr Fitzpatrick, who calls it “a nuclear hedge if Iran acquires nuclear weapons.”
The wider concern is that the North Korean bomb could prove the final straw for the world’s non-proliferation regime as a whole, enshrined by the 1968 NPT. That treaty offered a deal in which nuclear weapon states would “pursue negotiations in good faith” on nuclear disarmament, while other states would abstain from achieving nuclear weapons capability.
“The addition of a new state with nuclear weapon capacity is a clear setback to international commitments to move towards nuclear disarmament,” Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, said yesterday.
Flaws have been in the system from the start: Israel, a de facto nuclear state for at least 30 years, has never signed the treaty; nor have India and Pakistan. Nevertheless, the NPT has helped prevent – so far – what US President John F. Kennedy feared when he spoke in 1963 of “a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons”.
Over the last decade, however, the cracks have widened: India and Pakistan carried out high-profile nuclear tests in 1998, without long-term consequences in terms of sanctions. North Korea itself announced its withdrawal from the NPT in 2003. The US has set up programmes to look at modernising its nuclear arsenal. A UN conference held last year to update the treaty and deal with such flaws collapsed and Mr ElBaradei blames the superpowers for failing to take more action on disarmament in recent years.
Yesterday he reinforced his call for a legally binding universal ban on nuclear testing through the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a treaty the US has balked at ratifying. He and Kofi Annan, outgoing UN secretary-general, also want a fissile cut-off treaty, which would reduce the amount of material that could be used for nuclear weapons.
Mr ElBaradei and his sympathisers do not argue that such steps would do much to discourage North Korea from proceeding with its weapons plans; they do, however, believe that they could help shore up an international non-proliferation system.
Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Kennedy school of government at Harvard University, says that the world’s leadership could learn much from the response of President Lyndon Johnson to China’s own nuclear test explosion in 1964. On that occasion, Beijing was seen by many in the west as a chilling addition to the nuclear club.
But Mr Lewis says President Johnson struck the right note by stressing the US commitment to Asia, and also that it retained – as it does today – an overwhelming advantage in conventional and non-conventional forces.
He adds that the US should make clear to countries such as Japan, South Korea, Egypt and Turkey that their membership of the nuclear club is out of the question. “If the US remains committed to the non-proliferation regime, it is within the power of the US to continue to maintain that regime even in spite of a North Korean test,” he says. “If the US chooses to give up the regime because of the test, then the regime is dead . . . We do have choices after all.”
Relentless pursuit brings a challenge close to home
Even before he was nominated formally as United Nations secretary-general on Monday, Ban Ki-moon was thrown in at the deep end of a crisis that is likely to dominate his agenda for the foreseeable future, writes Anna Fifield in Seoul.
As South Korea’s foreign minister, few people are as well versed in the intricacies of the North Korea nuclear situation as he. And as incoming secretary-general, few will have the scope to influence how the crisis of Pyongyang’s new nuclear capability is managed. It is fair to say that his tenure at the UN secretariat will be judged largely on how he handles this issue above all others.
Mr Ban on Monday stressed South Korea “will be firm and resolute in adhering to the principle of no tolerance for a nuclear North Korea...we will seek firm and strong measures so as to get North Korea to abandon all of its nuclear weapons and related programmes”.
He last week told the Financial Times that he would make North Korea the priority of his tenure at the UN. He added he would like to travel to Pyongyang, something his predecessor Kofi Annan never had a chance to do in 10 years in the post.
That approach echoes the moderate policy of South Korea, which has promoted almost unconditional economic engagement with the North – often at variance with US strategy and that of the Japanese, who will no doubt call for strong punitive measures against Pyongyang.
Mr Ban will come under intense scrutiny from sceptics who do not believe he is tough enough for the demanding job. But while he has been described in the west as gentle and not very forceful, he is known in Korea for a low-key but relentless style which is credited, among other accomplishments, with getting him the current post at the UN. He was nominated formally yesterday by the Security Council, with confirmation by the General Assembly a near certainty.
At the time he announced his candidacy – in February, long before anyone else – he was not considered a particularly serious contender. The general consensus was that a more forceful candidate would emerge.
But Mr Ban pursued his campaign behind the scenes. In the first straw poll held in the Security Council last month, the unexpected degree of support for the unflashy, softly-spoken South Korean – the first Asian to hold the post since U Thant of Burma between 1961 and 1971 – raised suspicions.
Competitors accused him of cutting back-room deals when Kang Kyung-wha, a senior South Korean diplomat and one of Mr Ban’s campaign managers, was appointed UN deputy high commissioner for human rights. This was followed by allegations of votes-for-jobs trading with Britain. Mr Ban was accused of buying votes with development aid to Africa, by cutting a generous trade deal with Greece and even giving pianos to Peru.
Mr Ban vehemently denies any impropriety, saying: “I’m a man of integrity”.
But the South Korean, who in person is charming and quick to smile, admits he is “annoyed” by the suggestion he suffers from a charisma deficit. “This is my style – I respect others before putting myself forward,” he says, adding that in Asian culture, such modesty is considered a real virtue.
“Don’t make the story too much about me – I’m not used to all this attention,” Mr Ban whispered in the garden outside his official residence in Seoul, after speaking to the FT for this profile.
His dedication to the job is legendary, even in workaholic Korea. As minister, his schedule is broken down into five-minute blocks. He sleeps for five hours a night and claims never to have been late to work in his life. In the 33 months that he has been foreign minister – an eternity in South Korean politics – he has taken only a couple of days off, for his youngest daughter’s wedding.
Korean diplomats say Mr Ban, in contrast to some of his predecessors, has tackled policy and process with equal vigour.
These traits and his tendency towards diplomatese have led to the impression that the incoming secretary-general is too gentle and consensus-minded. The US’s support for his candidacy has also created an impression that Washington sees Mr Ban as someone they can easily influence.
But the 62-year-old, who has traversed war and poverty to become head of one of the world’s largest institutions, says he should not be underestimated: “I might look soft on the outside but I’m a man of strong inner strength – otherwise I could not have done all that I have.”
Joseph Nye, who was one of Mr Ban’s professors while he completed a masters in public administration at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1985, says the Korean has “a rare combination of analytic clarity, humility and perseverance”.
The oldest of five children, Mr Ban was born in the tiny village of Umsong in 1944, the year before Korea was liberated from Japanese occupation. After liberation, the peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel, the north under Soviet protection and the south under the US.
But shortly after his sixth birthday, North Korean communist forces invaded, triggering three years of war that devastated South Korea and led to widespread poverty.
“During the war, my family moved to a small, very remote village under a mountaintop that even soldiers couldn’t find,” Mr Ban told the FT, leaning back into a white armchair in his spacious house.
Surrounded by American soldiers in the aftermath of the war, the teenager started teaching himself English, and won a competition for a Red Cross-sponsored grant to travel to the US for a few months in 1962. He still fondly recalls his stay in San Francisco, and last year even invited his now 88-year-old hostess, “Mrs Patterson” to visit Seoul, where she was feted like a long-lost American relative.
In Washington, on the same trip, he met President John F. Kennedy, an event that sparked his desire to be a diplomat. “It fits my character – I’m always making lots of friends and I’m sociable,” Mr Ban says. “On the official side, we are a divided country, we lack natural resources, we are overpopulated and we have security problems – so it’s diplomacy that can really defend Korea.” Having seen his own country transformed from a poor, war-ravaged nation into the world’s 10th-largest economy, famous for its advanced technology, he says he sees potential rather than despair in developing countries.
After studying international relations at Seoul National University, he sat the foreign service exam – receiving the top score – and became a diplomat in 1970. Starting in India, his career has spanned the world, including three previous tours at the UN and a stint as ambassador in Vienna, where he learnt to waltz. “I have two left feet” he confided.
His one slip followed a visit of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, in 2001, when the media reported South Korea was edging closer to Russia and away from the US. Mr Ban was fired. “I had 45 days as a private citizen and that was a very difficult time for me – I couldn’t sleep for two weeks,” he says.
But the episode turned out to help Mr Ban in his bid to become secretary-general. He was sent to New York as the chef de cabinet for Han Seung-soo, the former South Korean foreign minister who became president of the UN general assembly in 2001. Mr Han speaks glowingly of Mr Ban: “I am sure he will exercise wise leadership at the UN.”
One diplomat in Seoul who has worked under Mr Ban for 25 years says: “There has been a sense of security under Ban Ki-moon because he has such credibility and because he has not shied away from his administrative duties in favour of policy, he is in charge from A to Z.”
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