Six years ago, a Portuguese was acclaimed Secretary General of the United Nations. António Guterres, then 67 years old, was acclaimed by the 193 nations that make up the General Assembly and included, among others, the High Commissioner for Refugees and the leadership of two governments in Portugal.
Challenged to choose the moments that mark, until now, the Portuguese mandate in the UN, the co-author of “The world does not have to be like this”, the official biography of Guterres, chooses three: the election of Trump, the Covid-19 – “the first pandemic faced by the UN” – and the “illegal” war in Ukraine started by one of the permanent members of the Security Council, Russia.
Pedro Latoeiro, who is also a political advisor to the Argentine embassy in Portugal, even mentions that if Donald Trump – “whose government practically coincides with the first term of António Guterres” – had been re-elected, the possibility of a second term for the Portuguese in the UN would give him “many doubts”. At stake are the former US leader’s decisions that constituted “insults,” such as moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.
The war in Ukraine, a conflict that must be viewed “through two lenses” and that “in record time produced 7.6 million refugees and 6.2 million internally displaced persons”, naturally also marks the mandate of whoever was High Commissioner for Refugees. Although the UN seems to have “learned” from previous humanitarian crises “where the intervention had not gone well” -an expression that Pedro Latoeiro takes as a euphemism-, for this it will have “counted the leadership and experience of António Guterres”.
But his six years at the head of the UN are not exempt from criticism, especially for the actions of the secretary general in the face of the Russian invasion. “While various European leaders traveled to Moscow and Ukraine to try to do everything possible and give public signs of it to avoid armed conflict”, Guterres did so only “after the start of the armed conflict”.
Still, he was quick to condemn the invasion, “even addressing President Putin by name, which is quite unusual,” visited Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, and “was one of the promoters of the agreement that allowed the export of Ukrainian grain.” More recently, he again condemned Moscow’s annexation of Ukrainian regions, drawing “harsh criticism from the Kremlin.”
But there is more to the world than the world, and Pedro Latoeiro identifies the internal challenges that Guterres also faces. One of them is to modernize the communication of the UN and there is a track in the headquarters of the organization.
“António Guterres works on the 38th floor, which is the Secretary General’s floor, and the spokesman works on the 2nd floor. It would be important for the UN and the Secretary General to communicate otherwise,” he explains.
And the biggest challenge is yet to be overcome, identifies Pedro Latoeiro, because “Guterres has not yet managed to leave his big mark on the international agenda.”
Source: TSF
