UN chief Ban Ki-moon retires to rings of praise and drums of criticism

Outgoing United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon speaks during the unveiling ceremony of his official portrait at United Nations headquarters in New York City, US, December 14, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

However, Gowan said the secretary-general has been "commendably frank about some of his own errors," particularly the UN failure "to respond effectively to the mass killings that took place during the end of the Sri Lankan war in 2009," and the Haiti Cholera crisis where Ban "only just apologized for the UN's role in mismanaging the Haiti cholera outbreak" in 2010 that killed some 10,000 people.

The world organization blamed the outbreak on poor sanitary conditions at a Nepalese camp of UN peacekeepers. Victims were helped and programs initiated to prevent new cases but Ban didn't admit responsibility until only last August.

The sticking-to-his guns trait surfaced again after he said, during a visit to a camp in Western Sahara, that it appeared under "occupation."

That upset Morocco which annexed the region after the colonial power Spain surrendered it in 1975.

While he expressed regret through spokesman Stephen Dujarric at the "misunderstanding," there was no retraction.

Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, writing in a New York Times opinion piece during Ban's seventh year in office said, "The U.N. under Ban's stewardship has managed to get some things right: (generally) providing effective relief to refugees, (generally) doing a decent job on peacekeeping."

But criticism continued to come down on the world organization over Syria.

Ban did assign three personal envoys to handle the crisis -- the first two resigned in hopelessness.

The Security Council, divided over the Syrian conflict, has been ineffectual.

In his speech during the high-profile annual General Debate in the UN General Assembly this past September, Ban lamented an even longer-running problem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion," said the UN chief. "Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness. This is madness. Replacing a two-state solution with a one-state construct would spell doom: denying Palestinians their freedom and rightful future, and pushing Israel further from its vision of a Jewish democracy towards greater global isolation."

He immediately met vociferous Israeli opposition to that statement.