Who Will Lead the UN in the Age of Genocide?

On 23 July, a debate was held between the candidates for the post of Secretary-General of the United Nations — the most important post in the most important organisation within what is known as the international community, a term that denotes a vast international edifice of institutions, organisations and courts, built after the Second World War in the wake of genocide and for the purpose of preventing it.

The selection process comes at a moment when a genocide has been under way in Palestine for close to three years — a genocide whose foremost backer is the United States, which is at one and the same time the organisation’s largest contributor. It is a situation that leaves the organisation, and whoever runs it, caught between its duty and its role on the one hand and the organisation’s funding on the other.

To this must be added the immense and unprecedented pressure Washington brings to bear on the organisation and on the other legal and human-rights bodies — as in the case of the judges of the International Criminal Court, upon whom sanctions were imposed for attempting to deliver some measure of justice.

This is because “justice DOES threaten Apartheid Israel & Co”, as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, observed. She too faces a ferocious war waged by the genocidal powers for doing her duty and seeking to stand in the way of the greatest of crimes — a war that has extended to American and international sanctions imposed upon her, and to threats to kill and rape her and her family.

It is amid this atmosphere and in this context that the process of selecting the United Nations Secretary-General unfolds, among six declared candidates and other candidates whose names are being circulated among the diplomatic missions to gauge their chances. It is an exceedingly difficult process while the American empire is ruled by an extremist populist current that does not believe in law to begin with, led by Trump, who proclaims and boasts of war crimes.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the session should be chaired by Annalena Baerbock, President of the General Assembly, who spared no effort in supporting the genocide in Gaza while serving in her previous post as foreign minister of Germany — the second-largest supplier of weapons to Israel over the course of the genocide — and who is the author of the notorious statement affirming Israel’s right to bomb schools and to bomb civilians.

It is this context that makes Rafael Grossi one of the candidates with the strongest chance of winning the post, even though he was the least convincing of them before the audience at the debate. Throughout his tenure as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he contrived to please every party and every power. beginning with his report on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, in which his position was to Russia’s satisfaction.

Furthermore, Grossi has succumbed to the American wish that no decision be taken, no criticism voiced and no mention made of the strikes Washington and Tel Aviv carried out against Iran’s nuclear facilities in June of last year, in what came to be known as the twelve-day war. And, on top of that, his never once speaking of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which lies entirely beyond international monitoring and transparency.

He then appointed a Chinese deputy — a move recently reciprocated by the appointment of his daughter, Agustina Grossi, to the Food and Agriculture Organization, according to an investigation by Italian Insider. It was hardly surprising, then, that he should refuse to suspend his duties until the electoral process is over in order to avoid a conflict of interest, in defiance of the General Assembly’s call to do so — quite apart from the fact that he is the candidate of an Argentine government close to Israel and looked upon with favour by the United States.

As for Rebeca Grynspan, Costa Rica’s candidate, she has family inside Israel: among them her sister’s sons, who served as officers in the Israeli army that stands accused of genocide in Gaza, while the rest are settlers living in West Bank settlements, in homes and on land stolen from Palestinians — Palestinians who are killed and terrorised daily by acts of terror committed by those very settlers.

The sole African candidate, Macky Sall, the former president of Senegal, comes with a heavy human-rights record: sixty-five peaceful demonstrators killed, more than 1,600 arrests and more than 3,000 injuries in the course of putting down the protests that erupted against him while he held office — alongside his assaults at the time on press freedom, his severing of internet and telephone service, and other human-rights crimes from which he escaped by means of a general amnesty law passed during his presidency.

Michelle Bachelet, by contrast, the former president of Chile, comes to the contest in a strong position on account of her record in defending human rights — she served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights — even as she faces Israeli and American opposition, with twenty-eight members of the US Congress calling on their secretary of state to veto her. Nor have the campaigns of incitement against her let up since she published the database of companies operating in the Israeli settlements, among them major global firms such as Airbnb, Booking, Expedia and Motorola — and this despite the intense pressure brought to bear on her not to do so, and the openly declared fury of the American secretary of state, who held the publication of that list to be an anti-Israel bias.

Then there is María Fernanda Espinosa, Ecuador’s former foreign minister, whom Israel and its media machine hold in enmity because of her position on the occupation — particularly after her earlier battle in 2018, which she won to take the presidency of the General Assembly despite the opposition and the heavy mobilisation Israel marshalled against her over her rejection of Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, her rival at the time being the candidate from Honduras, one of only nine states that endorsed Trump’s recognition.

Finally there is Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana’s permanent representative to the United Nations and its former foreign minister, who drew the highest marks of any candidate during the debate and was the only one to mention the catastrophe in Sudan in her intervention. She too is criticised by Israel for speaking of the systematic starvation Israel has pursued in the Gaza Strip — itself one of the methods of genocide.

These are the six official candidates who took part in the debate, alongside the Ugandan Olara Otunnu, the former Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, who was nominated after the debate had taken place.

Amid all this, eyes are fixed on the selection process, whose most consequential stage comes at the end of this month, after the early determination of those to be eliminated by a veto from one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Once the eliminations are done, we shall see who survives these balances of power and who is added to their number.