Can the Iron Lady from the Baltics Save the United Nations?

By Ayca Ariyoruk
12 April 2006

Based on power measurements such as visibility and economic impact, Forbes magazine named Vaira Vike-Freiberga one of the 100 most powerful women in the world, a tribute she shares with the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Previously as an academic and community leader and more recently as the Latvian president, Mrs. Vike-Freiberga helped resuscitate and rebuild the small Baltic nation of 2.3 million, which had been completely absorbed into the communist Soviet empire and had disappeared from the world map for half a century.
Vaira Vike-Freiberga
Although Vike-Freiberga has not announced her candidacy for the top U.N. job, some observers speculate she is what the U.N. needs. An inspirational leader, Vike-Freiberga offered hope to Latvians at times of desperation and demonstrated moral courage to do the right thing despite the consequences. We met on March 8, 2006 at her modest presidential suite in a mid-town hotel in New York. Minutes before our rendezvous, she had met with Secretary General Kofi Annan, to whom she served as a special envoy, promoting Mr. Annan’s agenda on reform in the period leading up to the World Summit in September 2005.

The question of “What did you tell Mr. Annan?” naturally opens up our conversation. Referring to Mr. Annan’s recent report on management reforms, she responds that she has “ congratulated him on his proposal to streamline the procedures, re-evaluate the programs, and upgrade staff qualifications at the U.N. – in other words, on investing in organizational, infrastructure, and human resources”. She adds: “I wish the secretary general well in pushing it through both the budget committee and the General Assembly, which by the way will not happen for a few months, but will be spread over a period of five years.” Vike-Freiberga expresses a belief that not everybody will be thrilled with the proposed changes. However, in her opinion “the painful choices are best taken quickly”. “When you are docking a dog’s tail, it is better to dock it in one cut as not to prolong the process. It will hurt for a while then it’s going to heal, and you will have a handsome dog, or a new country, or a new organization. It helps to lessen the pain if you do it quickly.”

A Painful Personal Journey
At present, Vike-Freiberga (69), resides at a 14 th century castle in the Latvian capital of Riga, but as a child she had to endure the horrendous living conditions of refugee camps. Her family fled Riga in 1944, three days before the Red Army invaded the city. The following winter marked a turning point in her life as she witnessed the death of her baby sister in a German refugee camp. “ As a child I wanted to help humanity. I wanted to do something, because nothing could be done for my little sister and all these others who were dying around her. We had no aspirin, absolutely nothing to help the sick; it was survival of the fittest in the grossest, most brutal way.” After brief schooling in refugee camps in Germany and French Morocco, in 1953 she and her family settled in Canada. She was accepted to medical school but chose to study collective psychology instead, which would enable her to resolve group conflicts much like the ones that caused the suffering she witnessed as a child. Vike-Freiberga embarked on a distinguished academic career becoming a professor of collective psychology at McGill University in Montreal and specializing in the relationship between memory, thought, and language. According to her, “Psychology is not about bourgeois individualism and it’s not just psychoanalysis. Collective processes have a psychological aspect and nowhere is it more apparent than in politics, because politics is all about group psychology and mass processes.”

Guarding and Re-building Latvia
Determined to conserve Latvian identity, Vike-Freiberga devoted herself to the preservation of Latvian cultural heritage. In the process, she scanned thousands of Latvian folk songs into a computer database and wrote widely on Latvian folklore and language. She traveled the world to speak to Latvians scattered around the globe and nourished their dream of returning home to a free, independent, and democratic Latvia. Latvia suffered immensely under Soviet rule, during which thousands were either executed or forced to work in Siberian labour camps.

After the failed Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, Latvia along with the two other Baltic nations, Lithuania and Estonia, saw an opportunity to break free and declared independence. Seven years later, Vike-Freiberga returned to Latvia to head the Latvian Institute charged with raising the nation’s profile and within a year was elected president by the 100-membered Latvian Parliament. She is the first woman to hold such a position in an Eastern or Central European state.

As president, she dove right into the real business of rebuilding the country and led Latvia through a series of political, economic, and military reforms, which gained the country’s membership in the two most desired western clubs, the European Union and NATO. Commenting on the changing role of NATO, she jokes that the alliance’s intervention will not be necessary during Latvia’s hockey games. Apart from its ‘stabilizing role’ in Afghanistan, NATO patrolled the Olympics in Italy last month and has been asked to monitor the soccer World Cup this summer in Germany, said Vike-Freiberga, when she addressed a think-tank audience in Washington D.C. President Vike-Freiberga will host the next NATO summit in Riga in November, in which the participants will asses an option to expand NATO’s role in addressing the crises in Sudan’s Darfur region.

During the first term of her presidency, Vike-Freiberga continued to utilize her passion for Latvia for the revitalization of Latvian identity. She vetoed a bill that would have turned Russian into Latvia's second official language, and also defended a new legislation, which now requires post-war immigrants to pass a language exam in order to acquire Latvian citizenship. Under Soviet occupation, Russians were flooded into the republic under a deliberate policy of Russification, squeezing the Latvian language out of official use.

Her straightforwardness and bold stamina gained her the reputation of the Iron Lady of the Baltics and made her an instant celebrity around the world. There is already a website, which, features news about Vike-Freiberga, follows her official appearances and collects quotes from her speeches. One popular instance presented itself when President George W. Bush and 57 other heads of states, attended a parade in Moscow to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. President Vike-Freiberga took the opportunity to publicly demand an apology from Russia for Stalin’s crimes. She has also been a supporter of the U.S. led war in Iraq, because she finds the idea of “uncontained dictatorship a very painful one.” Fluent in English, French, German, Spanish, and Latvian, she can manage Portuguese and Italian and started learning Russian as a gesture to the Russian minority in Latvia. She was re-elected in 2003 for a second four-year term as president. Her term will end in June 2007.

Do You Want Russia to Be Like Germany and Apologize?
Considering how much Vike-Freiberga irked the Russians with her daring rhetoric, one is curious whether she will bend her language to win the hearts of Moscow for the secretary general selection. Russia’s support is crucial given its power to potentially veto any decision that would make the Latvian president the next secretary general. “There are positive signs” says Vike-Freiberga, “Mr. Putin has already denounced the crimes committed in earlier times in the Czech Republic and in Hungary. We have not heard similar expressions from the current leadership of Russia about the Baltic countries, which I think would be welcomed.” She adds that “Latvia would be quite content with seeing the Russian Federation of today simply distance itself from the crimes of the Soviet Union… the Russian Federation is the heir of the Soviet Union but it is not identical with it. Having lost the war, Germany paid compensation, but the Soviet Union was part of the winning coalition so crimes continued for many decades.”

How to Strengthen the Office of the Secretary General?
Our conversation moves to the reform of the secretary general selection process. There she has a different take from other policy makers and experts who have been advocating a more open process. “ It’s difficult to reform a process that has not really been formalized to any great extent. It’s not the kind of job where you can submit your CV and apply. If they did that, it would, severely restrict the candidates to those who would only go for an open candidacy. The idea of it being very discreet and behind the scenes is very much like the search for top level executives for large multinationals or large corporations. It is usually done very discreetly so as not to embarrass potential candidates who would want to be considered or whom the organization would want to consider without causing embarrassment to others who are not selected. While she believes “transparency and some kind of coherence in the process are important”, she wouldn’t want to see it turn into a ‘circus’. “I would hate to see the selection of the secretary general being the sort of a process where candidates run around the world looking for financial supporters, where financial supporters affect the selection process and where votes are bought. It opens up a rather horrifying prospect.”

She also thinks the secretary general should have more authority over decisions in hiring and firing in the Secretariat. “You can’t expect somebody to be accountable and to produce results without having authority over those who work under that person. It’s an elementary principal of management that managers in a hierarchy assume proportional responsibility, but that responsibility has to be accompanied by authority.”

Geographical Discrimination at the UN?
Will the U.N. Security Council give her candidacy a serious consideration? That all depends on China. Earlier this year, China declared it was Asia’s turn to have a secretary general and Russia gladly endorsed it. The contenders who have announced intensions with advance endorsements from their governments are all from Asia. They are namely Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka [view U.N.ReformWatch No. 7], Surakiart Sathirathai of Thailand [view U.N.ReformWatch no. 9], and Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea.

With the habit of attacking the wisdom of conventions at the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton stated that the United States does not recognize the tradition of geographic rotations. If there was one, Bolton said at a press conference early this year, it would be Eastern Europe’s turn, not Asia’s, because Eastern Europe has never had a single secretary general. Vike-Freiberga doesn’t see any point in regional rotation either, as “it has not been consistently applied in the past…It’s not enshrined anywhere in the founding documents of the organization and has been at some point accepted as a way of going about it in a practical way.”

Time for a Woman?
There has also never been a woman secretary general and only about 16 percent of the high ranking jobs at the United Nations are occupied by females. Equality Now, an international women's rights group has compiled a list of 18 women it believes should be considered as a possible successor to the United Nations secretary general, among the names are Vike-Freiberga, along with the New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clark, and Colombia Foreign Minister Caroline Barco Isakson. Vike-Freiberga believes that it is high time for a woman to lead the United Nations: “sixty years gone by since the founding of the United Nations and I haven’t even heard of a serious candidate being mentioned for secretary general in previous years”. Ultimately, however, Vike-Freiberga says when choosing the next secretary general the primary concern should be qualities the candidates will bring to the United Nations.

Ayca Ariyoruk is a research fellow at the Center. The Center does not endorse any particular candidate, but works to promote a public element to the selection of the Secretary-General.