'Perez de Cuellar's name emerged for the first time the day before he was elected!'
That said, you are not the only Asian candidate in the fray.
Right, there is also a Sri Lankan, my friend Jayantha Dhanapala, a former UN under secretary general and currently advisor to the Sri Lankan president, a Thai (Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai) and a Korean (South Korea's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Ban Ki Moon).
They have been campaigning for a while now -- the Thai has been campaigning for two-and-a-half years; the Sri Lankan for about a year-and-a-half; the Korean officially since Valentine's Day, but unofficially since last year -- so yes, there are a number of candidates in the fray, and the thing is all of this public electioneering is new to the UN, because in the past it was all decided behind closed doors with very little noise.
In that sense, this will be a much more open and transparent process than in the past. And this year, unusually, the president of the Security Council wrote to the president of the General Assembly, and through him to all member States, that the Security Council intended to sit in early July to consider names that had been presented to it by member states. This therefore put the onus on member states to submit names by the end of this month.
A recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine also named Kemal Dervis of Turkey, who heads the UN Development Programme; former Poland president Aleksander Kwasniewski, and Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia as other contenders for the job. Is there a sense that they are out there in the fray?
That's for them to say. The Council will, I am told, only discuss the names that are officially submitted to it by Member States.
Right, so anyway, June 30 is the cut-off date.
Actually, there is no such thing, it is all unofficial. The Security Council is a law unto itself, it can pretty much do what it wants, make up its own rules as it goes along. There is nothing written down in the UN Charter, nothing one can point to and say this is how it needs to be done.
The charter merely says the Secretary General will be appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council, and that is all it says. It doesn't say how the process should work. So what has evolved are practices and conventions, sort of like the British constitution -- the way in which the Security Council has conducted itself in electing a Secretary General over the years has pretty much become the convention, the accepted way in which things are done.
Is there any particular reason your candidature is being announced so late in the day? You did point out that your rivals have been in the field and campaigning for a long time -- doesn't entering the ring this late become a handicap for your candidacy?
Not necessarily: indeed many expect that others will yet emerge. In the most famous case, Mr Perez de Cuellar's name emerged for the first time the day before he was elected!
Photograph: Jewella C Miranda
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