Helen Clark is a candidate to become the next UN Secretary General. She’s the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, serving from 1999 to 2008 and is currently the head of the United Nations Development Program.
We spoke in mid-July as part of a series of conversations I’m having with the candidates in the race to replace Ban Ki Moon when his term expires at the end of this year.The goal with these candidate conversations is to learn how some of their past experiences might inform the kinds of decisions they would make as Secretary General, and so to that end Ms Clark discusses growing up on a farm in New Zealand in the shadow of World War Two; becoming politicized in high school and university around the anti-apartheid movement; her decision to enter politics and some of the big foreign policy decisions she took as Prime Minister.
This is a great conversation with one of the most high profile of the Secretary General candidates.
Pusic grew up in Zagreb in a household of intellectuals in the aftermath of World War Two, which was particularly brutal in Croatia where Nazi collaborators carried out acts of genocide and persecution. She became ensconced in academia and later turned to politics. In her twenties, she started the first feminist NGO in Yugoslavia, and she discusses that experience.
Turk was born in 1952, just seven years following the Nazi occupation of Slovenia. He shares how his mother’s experience of being sent to a forced labor camp at the age of 14 affected his own childhood. That included an intense focus on eduction. By the time he was 14, Turk was devouring the greek classics, like Thucydides. By 18 he was in law school, discovering concepts of human rights.
