Shashi Tharoor of India was recently appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan to head the UN’s Department of Public Information. Although the 45-year-old Dr. Tharoor is interim head at the moment, he has left little doubt that he intends to make his mark on the sprawling department, which has an annual budget of $140 million and a worldwide staff of 735. A graduate of St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, Dr. Tharoor was the youngest recipient of a doctorate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He is an established novelist, columnist and nonfiction author, a familiar byline in many of the world’s top publications. He is also a highly sought-after figure on the lecture circuit. His new novel, “Riot,” is scheduled for publication later this year, and is already generating considerable buzz. The following are excerpts from an interview with The Earth Times:
Why is DPI important to the UN system?
The mandate of DPI is almost as old as the United Nations itself. It was spelled out in GA resolution 13 (I) of February 1946: to promote an informed understanding of the work and purposes of the United Nations among the peoples of the world. The underlying premise of the work of the Department is that only through worldwide public understanding of the work of the United Nations can the Organization generate international public support for its aims and activities. What I say to my colleagues is that they don’t come here to work to write a press release or produce a poster; they are here because without their work the substantive challenges of the United Nations would not be met. Peacekeeping will not succeed if the world doesn’t know what the peacekeepers are doing; the battle against AIDS cannot be fought if the UN’s co-ordinating strategy on AIDS is not clearly understood and communicated; poverty cannot be eradicated if public opinion in the donor world is not sensitized to the needs of the poor. Information, in other words, lies at the heart of the UN’s objectives.
How do you plan to streamline DPI?
There is always room for improvement, but my principal mission here as its Interim Head is not necessarily to set about restructuring the place. The Secretary General asked me to get the Department humming, and I’m trying to do that. But before I can decide what to do differently, I need to understand what is being done and how. So I’ve had a “town hall” meeting with all staff and listened to their concerns; I’ve met with every unit and I’ve walked into every office that DPI has at Headquarters, from the third basement to DC-2 across the street, meeting individual colleagues, finding out what they do, how they do it and how they themselves feel they can do it better.
I must say I’m impressed with the quality of the staff DPI has; there are bright, creative, interesting people at all levels, sometimes working with minimal resources in difficult conditions. And the General Assembly has given them a lot to do — when I asked to see the legislative mandates of DPI, I was given 38 pages of extracts from resolutions which DPI is supposed to fulfill! What I’m trying to do is to ensure that DPI gets out timely, comprehensive, balanced and reliable information through the print and audio-visual media, as well as through the new communications tools such as the Internet; that it runs effective advocacy campaigns in support of the objectives declared by the General Assembly, maintains a world-class library and builds stronger partnerships with UN agencies, the media and civil society, including NGOs, educational institutions and the private sector. It’s a tall order, but it’s all very much worth doing.
How do you ensure that DPI isn’t seen as a propaganda tool, yet that it serves the UN’s objectives?
By telling the truth! Information isn’t propaganda unless you doctor it to distort reality or hide inconvenient facts. We don’t do that. I think you’ll admit that under Secretary General Kofi Annan we have the most transparent United Nations imaginable — one that has officially authorized all staff to speak to the press within their areas of competence, one that has openly admitted its failures and mistakes (on issues as major as Srebrencia and Rwanda), one that has encouraged media access at all levels. That’s the spirit that will animate everything that DPI does.
What specific criticisms of DPI are you most mindful of?
Well, it’s hard to avoid facing up to the charges levelled rather prominently in the American media that DPI is bloated and “twice the size of the Dept of Peace Keeping”. I looked into that on my first day in the job, and found DPI has 428 staff at Headquarters, while DPKO has 497. How can 428 be double 497? So somebody said, “well, maybe you need to add the people you have in the field.”
You know we have 65 UN Information Centres working hard around the world, which employ 307 people. That takes DPI up to 735, but if you count exactly the same categories of civilian field personnel in peace-keeping, subtracting civilian police and so on, DPKO gets to over 12,500. So I think some of DPI’s critics need to look at the figures more carefully.
How do you plan to better coordinate DPI’s work with the info depts of various UN agencies?
That’s been a priority of this Secretary General’s since before I got to DPI. In my previous hat as his Director of Communications, I used to try and co-ordinate our external message as much as possible.
I’ve continued, while at DPI, to convene a weekly meeting, which we call the Communications Group, that brings around one table — or at least in one room! — everyone with a job that involves communicating the UN story to the world. So we have the spokesman, the speechwriters, the external relations people, the various DPI departments — but also the public affairs persons from OCHA, UNFPA, UNICEF and UNDP, the DESA official who handles outreach, and representatives in New York of UNHCR, UNESCO and UNAIDS, and so on. A real alphabet soup — but it’s consumed collectively by our discussions, and minutes are shared with those who could not be there. It doesn’t guarantee a hundred percent co-ordination, but everyone involved tells me it’s made a worthwhile difference; colleagues are far more aware of each other’s activities and issues, and people from different parts of the UN system are doing more things together than they used to. And it was Kofi Annan’s idea — the Communications Group didn’t exist before.
What is the extent of the SG’s involvement in the welfare of DPI?
Considerable. I don’t think there’s been a Secretary General who’s better understood the importance of getting the word out to the world. One of the first things he began saying after being elected Secretary-General was that the UN Charter begins with the words “We the Peoples”, but we act as if it was “We the Governments”!
The media guidelines he’s issued have been the most enlightened and far-reaching of any Government or international organization and are being held up as a model of their kind. As for DPI, as the Deputy Secretary General put it, the Secretary General wouldn’t have assigned someone from his own office to head this Department at this time if he didn’t believe in its importance.
What do you hope to accomplish during your tenure?
Well, as I said to my colleagues the day after I took over, DPI’s mission is to live up to its well-known initials: to make a difference by promoting the United Nations and influencing world opinion. To do the right thing, you’ve got to do the thing right. So DPI has to be dynamic in its work, pro-active in its methods, and interesting in its output. In other words, DPI must really be DPI!