Secretary-General

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, meeting US embassy staffers and families in Ottawa, Aug. 22, 2019. It was the last day of Kelly Knight Craft, right, as the American ambassador to Canada, yet the US can’t say when she begins her post as ambassador to the UN. ASHLEY FRASER/US EMBASSY
Donald Trump must have known just what he was getting into when he named Kelly Knight Craft to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations.

In Parliament on Aug. 6, 2019, Imran Khan, Pakistan’s leader, called the move by Narendra Modi of India to end the special status of Kashmir “racist.” The UN Security Council met on Aug. 16 to debate the crisis.

Police in Kashmir confronting protesters in December 2018. The new plan by India to take full control of Jammu and Kashmir will remake the map of the Himalayan border areas. Pakistan is working on bringing the highly disputed action by India into the UN Security Council. CREATIVE COMMONS

Pierre Krahenbuhl, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency, which administers to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, at a conference in Rome, March 2018. The agency, which was significantly rocked by the withdrawal of American donations last year, is now caught up in a possible ethics scandal.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which has been undermined by a sharp cut in United States contributions, has been embroiled in a scandal that threatens to jeopardize its very future.

Ana Menéndez, a former Spanish diplomat, leads the UN’s internal gender parity strategy and oversees the institution’s policymaking. In an interview with PassBlue, she said that the UN stands for certain “values,” and an integral part of those beliefs is gender equality. Here, she attends a UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting, March 2019. AMANDA VOISARD/UN WOMEN

United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, left, was the guest of honor at an official reception in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), Congo, on Sept. 13, 1961, with Cyrille Adoula, the head of the country, right, and his deputy, Antoine Gizenga (with glasses). Five days later, the secretary-general, the author’s father and others were dead in a mysterious plane crash in the region. UN PHOTO
My clock radio clicked on. The morning news bulletin announced that United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane was missing.
It was Sept. 18, 1961. I was 16.

Secretary-General António Guterres holding a global town hall meeting with United Nations staff members, Jan. 17, 2019. The authors cite instances of tough resistance to Guterres’s systemwide gender parity strategy, including from certain staff unions. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, a regulatory body of the UN, April 13, 2017. Rhodes, from Sierra Leone, retired a few weeks early from his job in December, amid allegations he had engendered a hostile workplace for women. 
Amid a busy December, when the United Nations was focusing on important conferences on climate change and migration and year-end holidays loomed, a case of harassment that never got the traction it arguably deserved ended in a traditional UN way: it disappeared.

A project of the UN Development Program has enabled the Aatral Arasi Palmyrah Crafts, a group in Sri Lanka, to grow. The author of this essay says, however, that in postwar societies, the private sector must play a major role in rebuilding societies to ensure lasting economic recovery. 
Another year of Secretary-General António Guterres’s reform of the peace and security pillar of the United Nations is ending without fully addressing a main obstacle to peacebuilding in conflict-torn countries under UN intervention: sustainable economic recovery.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, with Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, Nov. 19, 2018, during the UN Alliance of Civilizations forum. The country has called for an independent investigation into the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but the UN says it hasn’t received a “formal” request to do so.  ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO