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Nobel Peace Prize Goes to the Poor's Banker    [

    To Embody the UN
    Le Monde | Editorial

    Friday 13 October 2006

    Handing over his post in 1953, the first Secretary General for the United Nations, Norwegian Trygve Lie, described his job as "the most impossible one on the planet." These words must have resonated for Ban Ki-moon, the South Korean Foreign Minister who was to be dubbed Kofi Annan's successor by the UN's 192 countries on Friday October 13.

    January 1st, Mr. Ban, a 62-year-old career diplomat, will take the reins of the organization of which he must be, according to the UN charter, "the highest functionary." This definitive restriction suits the Bush administration, which supported Ban Ki-moon, for it sees him as a harmless manager. The South Korean minister is close to the United States on UN reform and Iraq, but he is not a US vassal. Mr. Ban supports the International Criminal Court and was one of the artisans of an opening to North Korea.

    The UN Secretary General must get along with the great powers - he is paralyzed without them - without alienating the rest of the world. The exercise is not glorious in any way and requires humility. It's no accident that no big name (Bill Clinton's had been bandied about) applied for the job in the end. Mr. Ban was "the best of the lot," comments one diplomat. He's an experienced negotiator who conducted a campaign in his own image: discreet, but methodical. He is determined, an indispensable quality for accomplishing a task Kofi Annan compared to Sisyphus pushing his rock.

    Like his predecessor, Mr. Ban could be transformed by the function. Ten years ago, Mr. Annan had been chosen by the United States to replace a Boutros Boutros-Ghali deemed too noisy. And, in spite of the threat of a French veto, the Ghanaian, a little known UN bureaucrat, rapidly distinguished himself with his persuasive powers as his sole weapon.

    While the UN had been promised a slow death by some, Mr. Annan opened it to the world, militated for humanitarian intervention and for those forgotten by globalization before receiving a 2001 Nobel Peace Prize and a triumphal re-election. Forgotten Rwanda, Bosnia. No superlative was spared at that time: "secular pope," "rock star of diplomacy É" The war in Iraq and the "Oil for Food" program nonetheless hurt the morale and tarnished the end of his term.

    The UN still remains today at the heart of crisis settlement with respect to the Lebanese, Iranian, North Korean issues. In ten years, the number of blue helmets has gone from 20,000 to 100,000 shortly. Mr. Annan's strength was to embody the UN, its values as well as its limits. Will Mr. Ban know how to be "the world's conscience?" We must hope so for him. The expression is not in the UN Charter, but it reflects the aspirations of the peoples it serves.

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    Nobel Peace Prize Goes to the Poor's Banker
    By Fabrice Rousselot
    Lib ration

    Friday 13 October 2006

Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus, inventor of micro-credit, was honored Friday.

    To try to understand Muhammad Yunus, who received the Nobel Peace Prize Friday, you must tell stories, then multiply them by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands. During an interview with Lib ration almost ten years ago, this Bangladeshi, today 66 years old, frail and shy, explained then that he "didn't know much" about finance. But Yunus had an idea: micro-credit and how to create a bank (Grameen Bank, which shares the Nobel with him) to lend to the poor.

    Since then, micro-credit has gained a following and become a global phenomenon. In 2005, 80 million people benefited from it and Yunus estimates that between now and 2020, 500 million people will be able to access these loans.

    Muhammad Yunus came to his idea in 1974, when Bangladesh was devastated by famine. An economics professor, just back from a seven-year stay in the United States, he met 42 bamboo weavers who couldn't pay for their raw material. Yunus lent them the equivalent of 100 francs [about $13] so that they could continue their business and asked them to reimburse him "when they could." Two years later, Grameen Bank was created.

    The grant of a Nobel Peace Prize to an economist by training may perhaps be surprising. But it consecrates a man whose activity has undoubtedly contributed to stabilizing dozens of developing countries as much on the economic as on the political level. "Durable peace cannot be obtained without a significant part of the population finding the means to emerge from poverty," explained the Nobel committee members Friday. In 1995, Yunus even convinced the World Bank to launch itself into micro-credit.

    For this son of a jeweler who acknowledges his luck to be born into a rich family in a poor country, it's a total commitment. In twenty years, Grameen has become a veritable empire, with even a telephone business. In 1997, during his meeting with Lib ration, Muhammad Yunus certainly did not have such an ambition. Then, he recounted one of his favorite stories about Mahfuza, a beggar whom he encountered regularly in the little village of Jobra. "One day I proposed to lend her some money. But she wasn't sure; she only asked me for 10 takas (around 15 Euro cents), because she didn't know what to do with it. It took me a month to offer her 30 takas. Little by little, she bought merchandise that she resold. She became a merchant."