By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, February 6 -- With Egypt's Permanent Representative to the UN Maged A. Abdelaziz set to meet on Monday with the returned Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, there's been scant reporting of a topic the two have discussed for some time now: a top UN job for Maged.
For many months the UN Secretariat has been abuzz with Maged's demands for a UN job. When the number two post at the UN Development Program opened up, Maged tried to become the African Group's candidate. This lead to a split; the job was awarded to a candidate from Costa Rica.
Since then, a senior UN official repeated to Inner City Press on February 4, Maged has continued to press for a UN posting, even as his name circulated in the pre-January 25 days as a possible foreign minister. “Now that chance is off the table,” the UN official told Inner City Press. “So Maged will just have to push the UN harder.”
Meanwhile Egypt's now deposed finance minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali resigned as head of the Monetary and Finance Committee of the International Monetary Fund. He could have tried to stay on, but didn't. A lesson for Mubarak?
The UN in recent years has handed top posts to a number of former Ambassadors, for example giving its Somalia post to Augustine Mahiga after he was Tanzania's Permanent Representative to the UN. The UN's envoy to Cote d'Ivoire, Choi Young-jin, was South Korea's Ambassador to the UN, along with masterminding Ban Ki-moon's campaign to become Secretary General.
Now the buzz is that deposed French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner wants to become the head of the UN Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH. Not only NGOs and many Haitians, but even other UN officials, think it would be a “terrible decision,” given France's history with Haiti. But this is Ban Ki-moon's UN. Watch this site.
