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By Joe Cochrane
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Talk about a busy week. As head of the United Nations Development Program, 51-year-old Mark Malloch Brown has spent the past few days hopping from one disaster-struck region in Asia to the next. Meanwhile, he is also preparing for his new role as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chief of staff. Widely credited with reforming the UNDP, which he will continue to lead, Malloch Brown is now also charged with seeing the United Nations through one of the most trying periods in its 59-year history. Plagued by allegations of corruption, inefficiency and even irrelevance, the world body will need urgent attention, as soon as he's made sure tsunami-relief efforts are under control. NEWSWEEK's Joe Cochrane spoke with Malloch Brown by telephone as he waited to board a plane to Sri Lanka on Friday. Excerpts:
COCHRANE: What were your thoughts, a day or two after the tsunami, when everyone began realizing how extensive the devastation and loss of life was?
MALLOCH BROWN: The sheer scale and timing of it was Biblical in character. We were all caught unaware. I went through the phases of not believing this was initially more than a typical natural disaster, to disbelief, to numbness, before realizing we had a huge natural catastrophe on our hands.
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The tsunami is not expected to have any global economic impact, given that the hardest-hit regions are relatively poor. Is this an indictment of the imbalance of globalization?
Clearly the fundamental lesson of natural disasters taken as a whole is [that] the poor suffer most. They're disproportionately the victims of droughts, earthquakes--you name it. Richer areas are better able to bring themselves out of a disaster afterwards. Thailand and Malaysia are not appealing for international assistance; [neither] is India. Development success saves the world a big humanitarian bill later. We will use the tsunami to say [that] today's generosity has been fabulous and fantastic, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, more broadly, we have to go on investing in development.
Will some people try to put a dollar value on the true impact of the tsunami, rather than focusing on the fact that tens of thousands were killed?
I haven't seen dollar estimates, and if I had, I'd immediately screen them out of my mind. At this point, it's so much about people. Any dollar figure doesn't do justice to the scale of the human crisis. These were poor people.
Is this a chance for the United Nations to show that it is truly a viable organization, given questions about its relevance during the debate on the Iraq war?
This is one of the things that even the United Nations' critics usually acknowledge it's good at--humanitarian intervention. We had disaster teams on the ground within a day. We have very strong country offices in all the [affected] countries, who were already at work by the time those disaster teams arrived. We have a network of disaster partners from around the world who were quickly mobilized by this. We do this well. We couldn't do it without the logistics backbone of the United States and others, but there's recognition that it's a more internationally acceptable way to do it. But I don't think, in terms of the United Nations' standing, that we'll slay all the other ghosts we need to have good answers on--what happened with [the scandal-plagued Iraqi] Oil-for-Food [program], and if there were management failings to address them. The United Nations needs to take a good, hard look at itself and go though a series of management reforms to make ourselves more effective.
You were a driving force behind reforms within the UNDP. What exactly did you do?
I think people acknowledge the UNDP is a very successful example of U.N. reform. It's an organization that, when I joined five and a half years ago, was in financial crisis, had perhaps lost its way in the eyes of many. We brought it back, with a huge staff turnover as part of the very far-reaching reforms we introduced. Many of my most trusted colleagues are people who have been in the organization for a long while, and just needed help getting the organization aligned and re-professionalized and connecting it again to its donor base so that we could get strong resources back. [Annan] made it clear in appointing me [as his chief of staff] that it was that kind of management turnaround success at UNDP, combined with the development agenda, that he wants to see brought into the United Nations proper. And the emphasis I've given at the UNDP on communications. It's those things that we've had success [with] at the UNDP, and we will see if we can repeat the trick at the United Nations.
Are you gearing up for what will be a bigger battle within the entire U.N. system?
Like a good play, I've had a good run in the provinces. Now I'm transferring to Broadway. The critics are a lot tougher and meaner, and the standard of the bar set a lot higher. I know my lines, I know the part, and we'll see what the critics have to say in the morning.
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