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
Kofi Annan of Ghana, whose popular and influential reign as secretary general of the United Nations was marred by White House anger at his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, died Aug. 18 in Bern, Switzerland. He was 80.
The death was announced by the Annan family and the Kofi Annan Foundation. The cause was not immediately disclosed.
Current U. N. Secretary General António Guterres called Annan “a guiding force for good,” and added: “He provided people everywhere with a space for dialogue, a place for problem-solving and a path to a better world.”
Annan, who pronounced his last name ANN-un to rhyme with “cannon,” shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the international body he led from 1997 to 2006. He 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.
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.
In 1995, Annan oversaw the transfer of U. N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia to a NATO-led force after years of devastating, ethnically-driven conflict. Annan’s comments at the time reflected the anguish felt by many at the U. N. 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?”
He was one of those few people who were able to understand it wasn’t just the rich and powerful nations that counted… that the rich and powerful nations were going to be very dependent, ultimately, on the poorer nations doing well.
His most important legacy as secretary general was his rejection of the long-standing notion that the U. N. could not interfere in the internal affairs of a member country.
He finally persuaded the U. N. 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 U. N. resolution that authorized the NATO bombing that helped end the dictatorial regime of Moammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.
Annan’s first, celebrated term as secretary general was capped by the Nobel Peace Prize. “In an organization that can hardly become more than its members permit, he has made clear that sovereignty can not be a shield behind which member states conceal their violations,” the Nobel committee wrote.
The U. N. works best when the secretary general and the U. S. president agree on most major issues. For that reason, Annan had a bruising second term as he pushed back against President George W. Bush’s growing determination to invade Iraq for supposedly harboring weapons of mass destruction.
“He had the bad luck to be secretary general when Washington was run by a band of ideologues,” Brian Urquhart, a former undersecretary general who is the dean of U. N. commentators, said of Annan in an interview. “If the United States had been on his side, he would have been regarded as in the class of Dag Hammarskjold,” the Swedish diplomat widely regarded as the U. N.’s greatest secretary general.
Annan became a continual irritant to the Americans. He eliminated an easy excuse for war by persuading the Iraqis to allow U. N. 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 authorizing an invasion.
When U. S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, Annan deplored the American failure “to solve this problem by a collective decision.”
“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.”
Annan was buffeted a year or so after the invasion by a conservative campaign against him over what was called the “oil-for-food” scandal. Under the program, developed in 1996 while Iraq was under sanctions before the invasion, Saddam Hussein was allowed to sell some oil to buy food for his people.
A commission headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker found that Hussein had profited illegally by almost $2 billion under the program from overpayments for oil and kickbacks for food.
The Volcker commission did not accuse Annan of making a single penny from the oil-for-food transactions. But it accused him of a failure of management for not preventing the corruption.
Annan was still venerated throughout the rest of the world, and after retiring from the U. N. in 2006 he soon took on a role in the mold of former South African president Nelson Mandela, as a wise, noble elder trying to mediate a host of conflicts in his native Africa.
Kofi Atta Annan was born with a twin sister on April 8,1938, 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. He named his son in the Ghanian Akan language: Kofi means “born on Friday” and Atta means “twin.”
After attending schools in the Gold Coast, Annan won a Ford Foundation scholarship to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1961, he found work as a junior administrative and budget officer with the U. N.’s World Health Organization in Geneva. He received a master’s degree in management from the Masschusetts Institute of Technology in 1972.
Annan began to attract wider notice at the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1990. On a special mission to Baghdad as chief of personnel, he helped persuade the Iraqis to release 900 U. N. employees and dependents held as hostages. He also organized an airlift of hundreds of thousands of Asian workers back to their original homes.
Boutros-Ghali pulled Annan out of the U. N.’s bureaucratic ranks in 1992, naming him deputy chief of peacekeeping, the most dramatic work done by the U. N. The next year, Annan was promoted to chief of peacekeeping with the rank of undersecretary general, the highest in the U. N. civil service. Annan presided over a record expansion of peacekeeping to 75,000 troops in 19 missions.
In his new role, Annan drew strong criticism from some journalists and activists for failing to sound the alarm about the threat of impending genocide in Rwanda. He and his aides worked behind the scenes to prevent the widespread killing in Rwanda, but they said the forces of ethnic hatred were too strong to temper. When the massacres erupted in the mid-1990s, the U.
