Will
António Guterres be the UN's best ever secretary general?
Cultured
and consensual, the Portuguese politician has had the perfect
preparation for the United Nations’ top job
Angelique Chrisafis
and Julian Borger
Sunday 1 January
2017 07.00 GMT
When António
Guterres resigned halfway through his second term as Portuguese prime
minister in 2002 because his minority government was floundering, he
did something unusual for a man who had seen the highest reaches of
power.
Several times a
week, he went to slum neighbourhoods on the edge of Lisbon to give
free maths tuition to children.
“He never allowed
a journalist to go with him or let himself be filmed or photographed,
and he never let journalists talk to any of his students,” said
Ricardo Costa, editor-in-chief of the Portuguese SIC News, who
covered Guterres’s political career. The former prime minister told
his surprised students that what he was doing was personal and not
for show.
The Portuguese
socialist, who becomes the next UN secretary general on Sunday, is an
intellectual who grew up under Portugal’s dictatorship and came of
age with the 1974 revolution that ended 48 years of authoritarian
rule.
Crucial to
understanding Guterres, 67, is his Christian faith: his progressive
Catholicism always informed his brand of social democratic politics.
In the heady days of
Portugal’s revolution, it was rare to be a practising Catholic in a
new Socialist party where many members had Marxist backgrounds. But
Guterres, a star engineering student who grew a moustache in honour
of the Chilean left’s Salvador Allende, would eventually become a
modernising leader, arguing that his mission was social justice and
equality.
On the Portuguese
left, faith was a delicate issue that required discretion. Under
Guterres, the country held a referendum in 1998 on a proposal to
liberalise the strict abortion laws. Socialist MPs had a free vote
and, as prime minister, Guterres chose not to officially campaign.
But it was publicly known that he opposed changing the law, which
irked many in his party. The no vote against liberalising the
abortion law narrowly won, but turnout was so low that the result was
not binding. Abortion laws were finally relaxed in 2007 after a
second referendum.
Born in Lisbon,
Guterres spent stretches of his childhood with relatives in the
countryside, where he saw the poverty of rural life under the
dictatorship, and later volunteered with Catholic student groups on
social projects in the capital.
In 1976, the young
engineering lecturer was elected a Socialist MP in Portugal’s first
democratic vote since the revolution. In parliament, he was a
fearsome orator. Such was his talent for verbally destroying
political opponents, he became known as “the talking pickaxe”.
Tony Blair shares a
laugh with António Guterres at the start of the Congress of the
Socialist International in Paris in November 1999. Photograph:
Laurent Rebours/AP
Guterres became
prime minister in 1995. His campaign slogan was “heart and reason”,
a cry for more humanism and social politics. Three years earlier he
had taken over the Socialist party and modernised it, although he
remained to the left of contemporaries such as Tony Blair. For years
he led the Socialist International international grouping of leftwing
parties.
With Portugal’s
rapid economic growth and nearly full employment, Guterres was able
to set up a guaranteed minimum income and nursery schooling for all.
But he had failed to win an absolute majority and was condemned to
preside over a tricky minority government. He had to rely on his
skill for consensus, always having to negotiate with the opposition
parties if he wanted to get anything passed – something he later
argued was perfect training for running the UN.
“He was a skilful
person – very smart, very quick to understand the other point of
view and very focused on having solutions – that’s why it
worked,” said António Vitorino, Guterres’s deputy prime minister
and defence minister.
Guterres was
furiously hardworking. But behind this was a backdrop of family
tragedy. His wife, Luísa Guimarães e Melo, a psychiatrist with whom
he had two children, had been critically ill for most of his time in
government and was undergoing treatment at a London hospital.
“It was one of the
hardest moments of his political life,” Vitorino said. “Every
Friday morning, he took a plane to London, spent the weekend there in
a very desperate situation and then on Monday morning he was back at
work. I was his deputy prime minister, I was amazed. I could never
have done what he was doing.”
In 1998, Guterres’s
wife died. The following year, he threw himself into the general
elections. He had hoped to win an outright majority but the
Socialists ended up one MP short and began a second minority
government. This time, a slowdown in the economy made things harder.
Guterres, privately
growing disillusioned with internal party politics, turned
increasingly to his interest in international diplomacy. He had
already won praise for his role in resolving the crisis in
Timor-Leste, a former Portuguese colony, which had erupted into
violence in 1999 after a referendum vote in favour of independence
from Indonesia. Guterres led diplomatic efforts to convince the UN to
intervene to restore peace.
In 2000, when
Portugal took the rotating presidency of the European Union, its
success was attributed to Guterres’s ability to get big leaders to
agree and smaller leaders to be heard.
“He did something
very original: he looked at what every country wanted and set up an
agenda that could be interesting for everyone,” said Francisco
Seixas da Costa, a Portuguese diplomat who served as Guterres’s
European affairs secretary. “Small countries disappear in the
decision-making process so we tried to listen to their interests.”
Guterres managed to
talk down powerful leaders at loggerheads. “At the European
council, I remember a conflict between Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl
over one issue,” Seixas da Costa said. “Guterres asked for the
floor. I was sitting next to him, I was afraid it might be naive. But
he took the floor and made a proposal that covered both their
interests, and it was a success. It worked. He had a fantastic
capacity to moderate and create links and bridges.”
In 2002, halfway
through his second term as prime minister, Guterres abruptly resigned
after the Socialists suffered a drubbing in local elections. He
famously said he wanted to avoid the country falling into a
“political swamp” and that he had discovered “politics has its
limits”.
At the time he was
unpopular, criticised for too much compromise and too much dialogue.
But over the years since his departure, polls showed he was
increasingly liked and seen as fair, serious and honest – a
possible contender for Portuguese president, although he never wanted
to return to national politics, preferring, he said, to make a
difference on the world stage.
His decade serving
as UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) from 2005 to 2015 was
seen in Portugal as an obvious fit for his personality: socially
engaged but seeking common ground.
Guterres – who
speaks Portuguese, English, French and Spanish and is now remarried
to Catarina Vaz Pinto, who works at Lisbon city hall – was known in
political circles for enthusiastic, cultured conversations on
everything from ancient Greece to Middle Eastern culture, opera to
geography.
Whenever he had free
time during visits to Washington as UNHCR chief, he would get the
organisation’s regional representative, Michel Gabaudan, to take
him to Politics & Prose or another of the city’s bookshops.
“He’s an avid
reader of history, and his pleasure was, if we had an hour, to go to
a bookshop, so we would have access to books in English that weren’t
easy to get in Geneva,” said Gabaudan, now president of Refugees
International. “I’m sure this immense knowledge of past and
ancient history did inform his political judgment.”
Guterres also took a
broad approach to the UNHCR’s responsibilities. The organisation
grew dramatically under his management, and not just because the
number of the world’s refugees soared in the 21st century. He
broadened the categories of people the UNHCR would seek to protect,
including internally displaced people and migrants forced from their
homes by natural disasters and climate change. He preferred the
all-encompassing phrase “people on the move”.
He managed to
persuade donors to fund the expansion by retaining their confidence
that the money was well spent, and to do that he cut overheads.
Guterres, then UN
high commissioner for refugees, visits Ikafe camp for Sudanese
refugees in northern Uganda in June 2005. Photograph: Radu
Sigheti/Reuters
“Like all UN
organisations, as the organisation had grown up, it had become a
little bit top-heavy and one of his first actions was really to slim
down headquarters fairly substantially. He sent people back to the
field and he put some of the services in much cheaper places than
Geneva,” Gabaudan said.
“He never thought
the details of finance were just for the technicians. I saw him
looking at spreadsheets faster than his financial officer, spotting
the line or column where we had a problem. So he was really as much
hands-on about how the organisation worked as he was the top
political figure and spokesman for refugees.”
When Justin Forsyth
was chief executive of Save the Children UK, he travelled with
Guterres to refugee camps in Lebanon, and recalled Guterres meeting a
group of children. “The thing that struck me was him cross-legged
on the floor of a tent talking to children. He really listens and he
asks questions and he’s very moved by what he hears. He gets his
hands dirty,” said Forsyth, the new deputy executive director of
Unicef, the UN children’s charity.
Guterres’s tenure
as high commissioner has attracted some criticism. Some former
officials said he should have spoken out more strongly in defence of
refugee rights enshrined in the 1951 refugee convention. “His
record is very mixed, particularly on protection. His tenure was a
rough time for the protection of refugees,” a former senior UN
official said. He pointed to Thailand forcibly repatriating ethnic
Uighurs to China despite the risk they would face persecution.
He argued that a
tripartite agreement the UNHCR made with Kenya and Somalia on the
voluntary return of Somali refugees had paved the way for the
reported forced repatriations now under way in Kenya aimed at
emptying its biggest camp, at Dadaab.
The former official
said the EU’s deal with Turkey to repatriate refugees, also widely
seen as a violation of basic principles of refugee protection, was
largely negotiated while Guterres was at the helm, even if it was
only signed in March this year, three months after he left.
“His style is to
make general statements on the issue but not to directly challenge
governments on their actions,” the former official said. “It
raises concerns on what he would be like as secretary general.”
Jeff Crisp, who was
head of UNHCR policy development and evaluation under Guterres and is
now a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Refugee
Studies Centre, said not all the criticisms could be pointed at the
secretary general designate.
He said the UNHCR
did push back against infringements of refugee rights by European
states and had been strongly critical of the EU-Turkey deal. And he
argued the tendency to address abuses by authoritarian states by
behind-the-scenes persuasion had historically been the “institutional
approach” taken by the UNHCR, before and after Guterres.
“I think you have
to understand that UNHCR’s public criticism of states is very
carefully calibrated and in general the more liberal a state is, the
more publicly the UNHCR will criticise it,” Crisp said.
Adaptable,
consensual, affable, intellectual, Guterres is perhaps better
qualified than any of his nine predecessors for the world’s most
demanding job. But one of his deftest skills he learned not from the
hurly burly of Portuguese politics, nor from the harrowing years at
the UNHCR, but from his first wife.
At a Guardian event
last June in which he debated with rivals for the secretary general
job, he said her psychoanalytical insights were highly valuable. “She
taught me something that was extremely useful for all my political
activities. When two people are together, they are not two but six.
What each one is, what each one thinks he or she is and what each one
thinks the other is,” he said.
“And what is true
for people is also true for countries and organisations. One of the
roles of the secretary general when dealing with the different key
actors in each scenario is to bring these six into two. That the
misunderstandings disappear and the false perceptions disappear.
Perceptions are essential in politics.”
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