‘Accidental’ UN chief an irritant to Americans over Iraq invasion
Kofi Annan, who has died aged 80, was a popular and influential secretarygeneral of the United Nations whose reign was marred by White House anger at his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.
Annan, who pronounced his last name to rhyme with ‘‘cannon’’, owed his original triumph and his later turmoil to tense relations with the United States, but in some ways, he was an accidental secretary-general.
His predecessor, Egyptian diplomat and minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was vilified by conservative American politicians for supposedly leading the US into disastrous overseas adventures. The
Clinton White
House was no more enamoured, and clashed with him over his reluctance to bomb the Serbs during the conflict in Bosnia.
The personal enmity between BoutrosGhali and Madeleine Albright, then serving US ambassador to the UN, had grown so bitter that she vetoed his bid for a second term in 1996, even though he had the support of all 14 other members of the Security Council.
Albright assuaged African members by sponsoring Annan, a well-liked UN insider who had risen through the bureaucracy mainly by handling personnel and budgets.
He became the seventh secretary-general and the first black African to hold the job. He did not fit the stereotype of the haughty and secretive international civil servant. He tried to answer all questions of reporters and ambassadors with disarming frankness. He published long reports, full of classified cables, that detailed UN mistakes in dealing with the massacres in Srebrenica during the Balkans war and Rwanda in the 1990s – a period when he was peacekeeping chief.
In 1995, Annan oversaw the transfer of peacekeeping forces in Bosnia to a Nato-led force after years of devastating, ethnically driven conflict. His comments at the time reflected the anguish felt by many at the UN over being unable to end that war.
‘‘In looking back we shall all record how we responded to the escalating horrors of the last four years,’’ he said. ‘‘And as we do so, there are questions that each of us will have to answer. What did I do? Could I have done more? And could it have made a difference? Did I let my prejudice, my indifference and my fear overwhelm my reason? And how would I react next time?’’
His most important legacy was his rejection of the long-standing notion that the UN could not interfere in a member country’s internal affairs. He persuaded the UN that a government’s suppression of its own people threatened international stability, making it a proper issue for the Security Council. This doctrine eventually led to the resolution that authorised the Nato bombing of Libya in 2011.
His first term was capped by the Nobel peace prize. But he had a bruising second term as he pushed back against president George W Bush’s growing determination to invade Iraq for supposedly harbouring weapons of mass destruction.
Annan became a continual irritant to the US. He eliminated an easy excuse for war by persuading the Iraqis to allow UN inspectors back in to search for weapons of mass destruction. He emboldened the ambassadors from Chile and Mexico to withhold support for an American resolution authorising an invasion.
When US forces invaded in March 2003, Annan deplored the American failure ‘‘to solve this problem by a collective decision’’. Afterwards, he infuriated the White House by telling a BBC reporter that the invasion was ‘‘illegal’’.
Bush aides thought Annan was trying to embarrass the president during his 2004 reelection campaign. Randy Scheunemann, a Republican foreign policy specialist, told the BBC that Annan’s labelling of the war as illegal was ‘‘outrageous’’ and ‘‘reeks of political interference’’. His stance also created anger and outrage in New Zealand, when Paul Holmes referred to Annan on his radio show as a ‘‘cheeky darkie’’.
Annan wanted to keep channels open so the UN could help the people of Iraq after the invasion. This would come to haunt him when a suicide bomber blew up UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003, killing his friend and troubleshooter Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil and 21 other UN officials.
‘‘You send in some of your best people who are friends,’’ Annan said in an interview, ‘‘and they get killed for trying to sort out the aftermath of the war you didn’t support, you can imagine my discouragement and melancholy. It was tough.’’
Kofi Atta Annan was born in Kumasi, Ghana, in what was then the British colony of the Gold Coast. His father was a senior buyer of cocoa for the Anglo-Dutch corporation Unilever. Kofi means ‘‘born on Friday’’ and Atta means ‘‘twin’’.
He won a scholarship to attend university in the US and, in 1961, found work as a junior administrative and budget officer with the UN’s World Health Organisation in Geneva.
Boutros-Ghali pulled Annan out of the UN’s bureaucratic ranks in 1992, naming him deputy chief of peacekeeping, the most dramatic work done by the UN. The next year, he was promoted to chief, presiding over a record expansion of peacekeeping to 75,000 troops in 19 missions.
In that role, he drew strong criticism from some journalists and activists for failing to sound the alarm about the threat of impending genocide in Rwanda. When the massacres erupted in the mid-1990s, the Security Council, led by the US, did little to stop them; hundreds of thousands were killed.
Annan’s first marriage, to Nigerian-born Titilola Alakija, ended in divorce. In 1984, he married Nane Lagergren, a Swedish lawyer and jurist.
In retirement, the couple lived in Switzerland, where he died. Survivors include his wife, two children from his first marriage, and a stepdaughter. –
‘‘You send in some of your best people who are friends and they get killed for trying to sort out the aftermath of the war you didn’t support, you can imagine my discouragement and melancholy.’’