United Nations Radio

PRESENTER: For the last three years, she has daily answered questions from the UN press corps. Now as the Secretary-General's spokesperson Michele Montas ends her tenure in what she describes as a challenging and frustrating assignment, she tells UN Radio's Diane Bailey about the experience and a little about the man she has represented, Ban Ki-moon:

Michele Montas

I have to say it's been an amazing ride; very challenging, frustrating at times. Certainly exciting, at other times. It's a job that leaves you no real rest to the extent that you're always on call, from journalists living in different time zones, which means that your phone can ring at 2 o'clock in the morning. And you can be disrupted by the Situation Center at the UN to tell you that there is a crisis in one country or another.

SO ONE NEEDS A LOT OF STAMINA FOR THIS KIND OF WORK?

And I feel I'm running out of it at this point. But it has been certainly rewarding. It's a job where you have to know a tremendous amount of things about everything.

But I say also I have been privileged in many ways. I have been a witness to some very tough political negotiations. At that level it has been extremely challenging and rewarding. Or going to a trip to Antarctica, that's a unique experience, on a human level, also a very unique experience. I spent three birthdays in a row in planes. My first birthday on the job was flying above the Amazon in a Brazilian plane.

YOU ALSO HAVE AN IMPRESSION OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL THAT'S SOMEWHAT CONTRARY FROM THE IMPRESSION THAT MUCH OF THE PRESS HAS: THAT HE IS A REALLY FIRM NEGOTIATOR AND NOT AS WEAK AS SOME HAVE REPRESENTED HIM TO BE.

Well, definitely he's not weak. He's someone who has principles, who can be very adamant in pursuing a solution to a crisis. He doesn't often, though, think that in the middle of a negotiation for the sake of projecting an image that he should be interrupting the course of that negotiation to take a public stance that would put the negotiations in jeopardy. I think this has been the case, for instance, of a number of journalists - I know three cases of journalists who have been imprisoned who the Secretary-General has contributed to freeing by discretely intervening with the government where they were detained. No one knows about this. And I did ask him this morning, for instance, "Why don't you say you helped in the release of that journalist"? He said, "If I do that, then I lose the channel that would allow me to free more". I think that it's that part of him which is the sense that you cannot betray some confidence if you want to have results make him maybe appear to the outside world like he's weak and he's not standing up to principles. I've seen him facing dictators, and sometimes he uses a soft approach, and sometimes I have heard shouting matches where he actually says what he thinks and he says it loud and clear. These sides of him are not apparent to the public. Of course what they see are the statements issued by my office on behalf of the Secretary-General which really do not reflect who the man is.

PRES: Michele Montas reflecting on Ban Ki-moon as Secretary-General and on her three years as his spokesperson. To hear more of the interview, including Michele's life before becoming spokesperson, visit our website, radio.un.org.

Duration: 2'48"