Remembering the work of Kofi Annan
Won Nobel for ‘bringing new life’ to organization
Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General who has died in Switzerland aged 80, was perhaps the most important and powerful leader the organization ever had though he was also one of the most controversial.
A descendant of generations of Ghanaian tribal chiefs, the soft-spoken Annan was the first secretary-general to have risen through the UN ranks to attain the post in 1997. His candidacy was championed by the United States, desperate to deny Boutros Boutros-Ghali, his Egyptian predecessor, his expected second five-year term.
Boutros-Ghali had fallen out of favour with Washington over his failure to reform the organization’s ramshackle structure and his outspoken attack on Western capitals for investing too much energy in the “rich man’s” war in Bosnia while ignoring conflicts in more remote corners, notably in Africa.
Annan, by contrast, seemed to be a man who would refrain from making diplomatic waves but would be an efficient chief executive, instilling some order into the morass of UN bodies and agencies and bringing about much-needed reforms that Boutros-Ghali had been reluctant to carry through. He would, it was hoped, be more secretary than general.
On reform, at least, Annan did not disappoint. He stripped a thousand posts from the organization, and made a string of popular appointments to some of its bodies, including the former Irish prime minister Mary Robinson to watch over human rights.
He replaced a system whereby agencies were led by independent heads reporting individually to the secretary-general with a cabinet system of leadership. He introduced fiscal reforms and brokered a deal to get the United States to pay its debt to the United Nations, estimated to be at least $1 billion, thus saving the organization from bankruptcy.
As a consequence, morale rose and in 2001 Annan became only the second secretary-general to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — for “bringing new life into the UN.”
Kofi Annan was born on April 8, 1938, one of twin sons of a manager for a chemicals company in Ghana, who was in line to become chief of the Fante tribe. A bright child, he was educated at a boarding school run by Methodist missionaries and then at Kumasi University.
He first went to America in 1959 to attend summer school in Harvard. Later he won a Ford Foundation scholarship to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where he graduated in economics. Soon afterward, in 1962, he joined the UN, working for the World Health Organization in Geneva, where he also studied postgraduate economics at the Institut de hautes etudes internationales.
He first came to public attention in 1990, when he persuaded Saddam Hussein to allow the repatriation of 500,000 foreign workers trapped in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion.
In 1993, he assumed the pivotal post of Under Secretary General for peacekeeping, at a time when UN peacekeeping operations were experiencing unprecedented growth.
Under his watch, the UN suffered the humiliation of the fiasco in Somalia, including the incident that left 18 U.S. servicemen dead, and the attempt to set up the so-called “safe havens” in Bosnia that did nothing to stop the massacre in 1995 of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica.
The UN received much of the blame, but there was considerable sympathy for the view, expressed privately within the organization, that responsibility lay principally with the governments who had endorsed the policy in principle, then failed to supply the UN with anything like the manpower necessary to implement it.
Almost worse, however, was the outbreak of genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Half a million Rwandans died in the slaughter, while the West and the UN essentially watched from the sidelines. It transpired in 1998 that Annan’s office had received intelligence before the massacres from General Dallaire, the Canadian head of the UN peacekeeping contingent, clearly warning that an immense tragedy was at hand.
The limitations of his role as head of the UN peacekeeping operations continued to constrain Annan’s options as Secretary-General. Mandated to carry out Security Council resolutions, he was reliant on the willingness of member nations to commit their resources and trained manpower to UN operations. When that was not forthcoming and UN operations failed, Annan got the blame.
But the organization also had its successes, largely thanks to Annan’s refusal to grandstand and his skill in delivering messages to those who needed to hear them.
HE INTRODUCED FISCAL REFORMS AND BROKERED A DEAL TO GET THE UNITED STATES TO PAY ITS DEBT.