NEW YORK: Ivonne A-Baki has a simple diagnosis for what is wrong with the UN. It is not the Charter. It is not simply the Security Council veto. And it is not a problem that can be solved by creating more bureaucracy.
“The problem with the UN is that there is no trust,” the Ecuadorian-Lebanese diplomat told Arab News. “Nobody trusts anybody.”
A-Baki, one of the candidates seeking to become the UN’s 10th secretary-general and the first woman to take on the role, has built her campaign around the proposition that the organization can recover its relevance only if it returns to its most basic purpose: bringing adversaries together before crises spiral beyond control.
Her prescription draws heavily on her own experience helping broker an end to the last interstate war fought in South America.
In 1998, Ecuador and Peru signed the Brasilia Presidential Act, resolving a border dispute that had generated repeated conflict for generations.
