On Jan. 15, 2016, Australian lawyer Philip Alston paid a visit to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on his 38th-floor office at U.N. headquarters. Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, was preparing a report that would castigate the United Nations for skirting responsibility for introducing cholera into Haiti more than five years earlier. If Ban hoped to salvage the world body’s good name, as well as his legacy, he had better move fast to right a historical wrong.
“It would be a great pity to go out on this note,” Alston said he later told Ban in what amounted to a thinly veiled warning.
For a man weighing a likely run for the South Korean presidency, the hint of a potential scandal proved persuasive. Ban, 72, subsequently ordered a review of the U.N.’s response to Haiti’s cholera epidemic, which has killed more than 9,000 Haitians.
And so on Dec. 1, after months of deliberation, Ban offered an extraordinary apology to Haitians on behalf of the U.N., ending years of denials about the organization’s complicity in the cholera epidemic. In a carefully crafted statement that acknowledged the U.N.’s moral, if not legal, responsibility, Ban said he was “profoundly sorry” and pressed U.N. member states to cough up as much as $400 million to treat and cure Haiti’s cholera victims.
The effort marked the first stage in an intensive effort to shore up Ban’s legacy before he steps down as the world’s top diplomat at the end of December.
Having endured a withering barrage of attacks on his leadership from his earliest days at Turtle Bay, Ban has notched some noteworthy late victories. He browbeat states into ratifying the Paris climate accord well ahead of schedule, and promoted gay rights within the U.N. bureaucracy and with conservative governments.
But the list of crises he will leave for his successor, former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres, is daunting. Syria is in free fall, North Korea’s nuclear arms program is advancing, South Sudan faces the specter of genocide, unprecedented numbers of refugees are on the run, and Islamist extremists are spreading terror throughout the globe. “We have collectively failed the people of Syria,” Ban told reporters at his final news conference on Dec. 16. “Aleppo is now a synonym for hell.”
The organization Ban set out to reform 10 years ago, meanwhile, is in many ways in worse shape than when he started, handicapped by great power divisions that have thwarted peace efforts from Syria to Ukraine and raised the specter of a new Cold War between Russia and the West.
Ban’s U.N. has also been beset by self-inflicted wounds: a glacial personnel system that has confounded the efforts of United Nations peacemakers and staff missions. A broken patchwork of watchdog programs that could not dependably root out corruption, expose sexual misconduct by U.N. blue helmets, or protect whistleblowers. And, indefensibly, the U.N.’s denial of responsibility for Haiti’s cholera epidemic.
“The most telling things about his legacy are the things he has the most control over, are the very things that have experienced some of the greatest failures,” said Bruce Rashkow, a former U.S. and U.N. legal advisor who has championed U.N. oversight reforms since the early 1990s.
Critics also faulted Ban for lacking the qualities — charisma, intellectual agility, and creativity — to make a great peacemaker. He has largely subcontracted mediation to a succession of special envoys, including former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to tackle peace efforts from Kenya to Syria. “Thank God he did delegate because as you can see, he is very weak on thinking on his feet,” said a top advisor. “That’s not his thing.”
Ban has bridled at the criticism, telling his aides that he has long been unfairly maligned by Western media because he doesn’t speak “Oxford English.” But his anger often gets taken out on his subordinates: Ban frequently erupts into fits of anger when things go wrong at staff meetings or if he is being challenged by subordinates, leaving aides to keep their heads down to avoid catching his eye.
“It’s like when you’re told ‘Don’t look a bear in the eye, or he’ll think you’re challenging him,’” said one advisor.
Despite such setbacks, the story of Ban’s rise to the world’s top diplomatic job is as inspirational as it is improbable. At age 6, Ban and his family fled an offensive by North Korean troops, seeking refuge in his grandparents’ mountain home. Cut off from supplies and forced to endure bitter winter cold, Ban and his family survived on American handouts — rice, flour, powdered milk, and hand-me-down clothing — and studied math and science in books donated by UNESCO.
Today, Ban still keeps an old, grainy, black-and-white photograph of himself as a boy with two younger brothers, a cousin, and another boy; it reminds him of the hardships of his youth. They stand together in an apple orchard, stoic and joyless, their jeans patched, their shirts torn and tattered around the wrists. That experience gave Ban searing insights into the trauma and deprivations of war.
“Life was very, very hard at that time,” he told Foreign Policy, recalling that local authorities once instructed the children in his village to come to the town hall to witness a display of large numbers of dead North Korean soldiers.“It was part of the anti-communism education. We had to see all these dead bodies. It was terrible.”
A model student, Ban finished at the top of his class in his elementary, middle, and high school before embarking on a diplomatic career that mirrored South Korea’s trajectory from a broken post-war nation to a major industrial powerhouse in which he served as foreign minister.
As secretary-general, Ban has retained the habits of that diligent student, reading stacks of talking points and briefing papers late into the night, underlining key passages in green, yellow, and red markers. Ban prides himself on keeping a taxing work schedule and forgoing vacations.
In March, Ban’s staff urged him to take advantage of a four-hour break in his Middle East travels to tour Jordan’s Petra, one of the world’s most famous archeological wonders. King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein would be there to accompany the U.N. chief. But Ban declined. Instead, he arranged a visit with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim to see the Zaatari refugee camp on the Jordanian border with Syria