Kofi Annan

• 1. Introduction

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  Kofi Annan became the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations only after France vetoed him four times and then finally chose to abstain. He was also the first holder of that office to be chosen from the organisation's own staff. From 1997 to 2006 he led the institution he had spent decades climbing through. He would be praised as its conscience and blamed for some of its gravest failures. How does a career administrator end up carrying so much of the world's hope? And what did he build, and fail to stop, while he held the job?

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• 2. Family and Schooling

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  Kofi means Friday in the Akan language, and Friday was the day on which Annan was born, on the 8th of April 1938. His surname, Annan, marks a fourth-born child in Asante. He said it rhymes with the English word cannon. He was born in Fante New Town, a Fante community in Kumasi, in the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana. His twin sister, Efua Atta, shared his middle name, because Atta means twin in Akan. She died in 1991.

  The twins came from one of the country's aristocratic Fante families. Both of their grandfathers and their uncle were Fante paramount chiefs. Their brother Kobina later became Ghana's ambassador to Morocco.

  From 1954 to 1957, Annan attended Mfantsipim, an elite all-boys Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast, founded in the 1870s. He later said the school taught him that "suffering anywhere, concerns people everywhere". He graduated in 1957, the same year the Gold Coast won independence from the United Kingdom and took the name Ghana.

  In 1958 Annan began studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. A Ford Foundation grant then carried him to Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There he finished his undergraduate economics degree in 1961. Classmates knew him for quiet leadership and a cross-cultural outlook. From 1961 to 1962 he studied international relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, earning a diplôme d'études approfondies. After some years of work, he returned to the classroom in 1971-72 through the Sloan Fellows program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He left with a master's degree in management.

  In 1965 Annan married Titi Alakija, a Nigerian woman from an aristocratic family. Several years later they had a daughter, Ama, and a son, Kojo. The couple separated in the late 1970s and divorced in 1983. In 1984 Annan married a Swedish lawyer who worked at the UN and was a maternal half-niece of the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. She had a daughter, Nina, from an earlier marriage.

  Annan was fluent in English, French and Akan. He also spoke some Kru languages and other African languages.

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• 3. Climbing the Ranks

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  In 1962 Annan started work as a budget officer at the World Health Organization, an agency within the UN system. From 1974 to 1976 he stepped away to manage the state-owned Ghana Tourist Development Company in Accra. In 1980 he became head of personnel for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. Between 1981 and 1983 he also sat on the Governing Board of the International School of Geneva.

  In 1983 he moved to New York as director of administrative management services for the UN Secretariat. In 1987 he became an assistant secretary-general for human resources management and security coordinator for the whole UN system. In 1990 he took charge of program planning, budget, finance and control, again as an assistant secretary-general.

  In 1992 Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali created the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and Annan joined it as deputy to Marrack Goulding. In March 1993 he replaced Goulding at the top of the department. American officials had persuaded Boutros-Ghali that Annan was more flexible. They also thought he fit the role the Pentagon expected UN peacekeepers to play in Somalia.

  On the 29th of August 1995, Boutros-Ghali was out of reach on an aeroplane. Annan seized the moment and instructed UN officials to "relinquish for a limited period of time their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia". That cleared the way for NATO forces to carry out Operation Deliberate Force, and it made him a favourite in Washington. Richard Holbrooke later said Annan's "gutsy performance" convinced the United States he could replace Boutros-Ghali. From November 1995 to March 1996, Annan also served as the secretary-general's special representative to the former Yugoslavia.

  In 1996 Boutros-Ghali ran unopposed for a second term. He won 14 of the 15 votes on the Security Council, but the United States vetoed him. After four deadlocked meetings he suspended his candidacy, and he remains the only secretary-general ever denied a second term. Annan emerged as the leading candidate and beat Amara Essy by a single vote in the first round.

  The Security Council recommended Annan on the 13th of December 1996. The General Assembly confirmed him four days later, and his first term began on the 1st of January 1997.

  A second term in 2001 required a bargain between regional blocs. Africa had already held the office through Boutros-Ghali, so another Annan term would give it three consecutive terms. The Asia-Pacific Group agreed to back him in return for African support for an Asian secretary-general in the 2006 selection. The Security Council recommended him on the 27th of June 2001, and the General Assembly approved on the 29th of June. Ban Ki-moon eventually succeeded him in 2007.

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• 4. Rwanda and Responsibility

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  In 2003 the retired Canadian general Roméo Dallaire published Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Dallaire had been force commander of the UN mission in Rwanda, known as UNAMIR. He accused Annan of being overly passive as genocide approached and of holding back troops, logistics and material support. He said his repeated faxes asking for access to a weapons depository went unanswered. Those weapons, he argued, could have helped him defend the endangered Tutsis.

  In 2004, ten years after a genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, Annan said: "I could and should have done more to sound the alarm and rally support."

  In his own book, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, Annan argued that his peacekeeping department could have used the media far better. Attention might have raised awareness of the violence and pressed governments to supply troops. He also pointed to Somalia. The collapse of the UNOSOM II mission there had made UN member states wary of robust peacekeeping. When UNAMIR was approved just days after that battle, the force lacked the troops, resources and mandate to work effectively.

  On the 20th of September 1999, Annan stood before the General Assembly with Rwanda and Srebrenica on his mind. He argued that the protections owed to individuals under the Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter were growing stronger. State sovereignty, meanwhile, was being redefined by globalisation and international co-operation. He had previewed this dilemma between "two concepts of sovereignty" in an article in The Economist on the 16th of September 1999.

  In the Millennium Report of March 2000, he put the question bluntly. If humanitarian intervention was an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, he asked, "how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica"?

  In September 2001 the Canadian government set up an ad hoc committee to weigh that balance. Its International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty published a final report that year. The report focused not on a right of states to intervene but on a responsibility to protect populations at risk. It argued that diplomatic and humanitarian action, not only military force, could serve that purpose.

  In 2005 Annan wrote the doctrine, called "Responsibility to Protect", into his report In Larger Freedom. When the General Assembly endorsed that report, it gave the doctrine its first formal endorsement by UN member states.

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• 5. Reform and Partnerships

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  On the 17th of March 1997, soon after taking office, Annan released a report titled Management and Organisational Measures. It created a cabinet-style body to help him run the UN around four core missions. A fuller agenda followed on the 14th of July 1997, titled Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform. It proposed strategic management, a new post of deputy secretary-general, a 10 per cent cut in posts and lower administrative costs. It also called for consolidating the UN at country level and reaching out to civil society and the private sector. Annan floated the idea of a Millennium Summit in 2000.

  In March 2000 he appointed a Panel on United Nations Peace Operations to diagnose the weaknesses of the existing system. Its report became known as the Brahimi Report, after the panel's chair, Lakhdar Brahimi. The panel called for "renewed political commitment on the part of Member States, significant institutional change, and increased financial support". It added that peacekeeping missions need adequate resources and clear, credible and achievable mandates. Later that year the Security Council adopted several peacekeeping provisions in Resolution 1327.

  Also in 2000, Annan issued We the Peoples: the Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. It urged states to "put people at the centre of everything we do". Its final chapter set out a goal of freeing people from poverty that confined more than 1 billion of them. At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, national leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration. The UN Secretariat turned it into the Millennium Development Goals in 2001.

  The same document proposed a United Nations Information Technology Service, a consortium of volunteer technology corps that included NetCorps Canada and Net Corps America. United Nations Volunteers coordinated it from February 2001 to February 2005. Its staff and volunteers took part in the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in December 2003.

  On the 31st of January 1999, Annan told the World Economic Forum that the goals of the UN and of business could be "mutually supportive". He proposed a global compact of shared values that would "give a human face to the global market". The United Nations Global Compact launched at UN headquarters in New York on the 26th of July 2000. Companies that join commit to ten principles covering human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption.

  In April 2001 Annan issued a five-point Call to Action on HIV/AIDS, calling it a "personal priority". He proposed a Global AIDS and Health Fund to raise the international spending that developing countries needed. In June 2001 the General Assembly committed to the fund during a special session on AIDS. Its permanent secretariat was established in January 2002.

  On the 21st of March 2005, Annan presented a progress report to the General Assembly that urged Security Council expansion. On the 31st of January 2006 he gave a reform speech at Central Hall, Westminster, marking the 60th anniversary of the first General Assembly and Security Council meetings. Two more reform reports reached the Assembly on the 7th and the 30th of March 2006. One was titled Investing in the United Nations, For a Stronger Organization Worldwide. The other was Mandating and Delivering. On the Human Rights Council, he warned that "declining credibility" had cast a shadow on the UN, yet he believed the council could still do good.

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• 6. Iraq and Controversy

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  After 1998, when Saddam Hussein's government expelled the UN weapons inspectors known as UNSCOM, one of their former chiefs turned on Annan. Scott Ritter blamed him for being slow and ineffective in enforcing Security Council resolutions. Ritter said Annan bent to the Clinton administration's demands to inspect sites, often presidential palaces, that no resolution required. He also claimed that Annan micromanaged the inspectors and blurred the chain of command. Iraqis, he said, would not follow orders from him or from Rolf Ekéus without Annan's approval, which could take days or weeks.

  Ritter described one case in which Annan refused a no-notice inspection of the headquarters of the Iraqi Special Security Organization. Annan tried to negotiate access instead. The talks took nearly six weeks, which Ritter said gave the Iraqis ample time to clean the site.

  During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Annan called on the United States and the United Kingdom not to invade without UN support. In a BBC interview in September 2004, he was asked about the legal basis for the war. He said it was not in conformity with the UN charter and was illegal.

  In June 2004 Annan received an internal oversight report on a complaint by four female workers against Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The complaint alleged sexual harassment, abuse of authority and retaliation. The investigation found Lubbers guilty of sexual harassment. On the 15th of July 2004, Annan cleared him, saying the accusations were not substantial enough legally. The report leaked, and a British newspaper published sections of it alongside an article by Kate Holt. In February 2005 Lubbers resigned, saying he wanted to relieve political pressure on Annan.

  In December 2004 reports surfaced that Annan's son Kojo had received payments from Cotecna Inspection SA. The Swiss company had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Programme. Annan called for an investigation. On the 11th of November 2005, The Sunday Times agreed to apologise and pay substantial damages to Kojo, accepting that its allegations were untrue.

  Annan appointed an Independent Inquiry Committee led by the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. In his first interview, Annan denied meeting Cotecna. Later he recalled meeting its chief executive, Elie-Georges Massey, twice. Amid the storm, Annan faced calls for his resignation.

  The committee's final report, issued on the 27th of October, found insufficient evidence to indict Annan on any illegal act. It did fault Benon Sevan, an Armenian-Cypriot who had worked for the UN for about 40 years. Annan had appointed Sevan to the Oil-for-Food role. Sevan repeatedly asked Iraqis for oil allocations for the African Middle East Petroleum Company. Volcker called his behaviour "ethically improper", while Sevan insisted he was a "scapegoat".

  The report also condemned the UN's management structure and the Security Council's oversight. It urged the creation of a chief operating officer to handle fiscal and administrative duties then held by the secretary-general's office. It listed Western and Middle Eastern companies that had benefited illegally from the programme.

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• 7. Prize, Missions, Farewell

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  In 2001, the centennial year of the Nobel prizes, the Nobel Committee split the Peace Prize between the United Nations and Annan. It honoured them "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world". The committee credited Annan with revitalising the UN and putting human rights first. It also noted his commitment to containing HIV in Africa and his declared opposition to international terrorism. In 2002 Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene of Asanteman, enstooled him as the Busumuru of the Ashanti people. Annan was the first person to hold that title.

  In 1998 Annan helped support Nigeria's transition from military to civilian rule. In 1999 he backed East Timor's effort to win independence from Indonesia. In 2000 he was responsible for certifying Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. In 2006 he led talks in New York between the presidents of Cameroon and Nigeria, which settled their dispute over the Bakassi peninsula. He also backed a UN peacekeeping mission for Darfur, Sudan. He worked with the Sudanese government to accept a handover from the African Union mission to a UN one.

  In 2006 Annan clashed with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over Iran's nuclear program, a cartoon exhibition mocking the Holocaust and an upcoming Holocaust denial conference. In Iran, he said: "I think the tragedy of the Holocaust is an undeniable historical fact and we should really accept that fact and teach people what happened in World War II and ensure it is never repeated".

  Beginning in 1998, Annan convened an annual Security Council retreat for representatives of the council's 15 states. It met at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Conference Center at the Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, New York.

  On the 6th of June 2006, Annan's deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, gave a speech sharply critical of the United States. He said that using the UN "almost by stealth" as a diplomatic tool, while failing to defend it from domestic critics, was not sustainable. Annan defended him. The speech broke an unofficial rule against senior officials publicly criticising member states. John Bolton, the interim US ambassador, reportedly told Annan by phone that it was the worst mistake by a senior UN official he had seen since he had known Annan in 1989.

  On the 19th of September 2006, Annan gave a farewell address to world leaders at UN headquarters, ahead of his retirement on the 31st of December. He named three problems that had sharpened rather than resolved during his tenure: an unjust world economy, world disorder, and widespread contempt for human rights and the rule of law. He also singled out violence in Africa and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  On the 11th of December 2006, Annan gave his last speech as secretary-general at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. He urged the United States to return to Truman's multilateralism, and to his view that "the responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world". He added that America must keep its commitment to human rights, including in the struggle against terrorism.

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• 8. Life After the UN

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  After leaving office, Annan took up residence in Geneva. In 2007 he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit organisation. It rests on three pillars: peace and security, sustainable development, and human rights and the rule of law. Its work is mostly private diplomacy, with Annan offering informal counsel and joining discreet efforts to head off crises. He was asked to help in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Myanmar, Senegal, Iraq and Colombia.

  In Kenya, violence broke out after the 2007 presidential elections. The African Union created a Panel of Eminent African Personalities and named Annan its chair, alongside Benjamin Mkapa, a former president of Tanzania, and Graça Machel. The panel brought President Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement to the table. Over 41 days of talks, the sides signed several agreements to stop the violence and repair its damage. On the 28th of February, Kibaki and Odinga signed a coalition government agreement.

  On the 23rd of February 2012, Annan became the joint UN and Arab League special envoy to Syria. His six-point plan asked the Syrian government to engage in a Syrian-led political process. It sought a UN-supervised halt to fighting by all parties and a daily two-hour humanitarian pause. It also called for the release of arbitrarily detained people, freedom of movement for journalists, and respect for peaceful demonstration. On the 2nd of August he resigned, citing the intransigence of both the Assad government and the rebels. The deadlock in the Security Council, he said, made peace impossible.

  In September 2016 Annan agreed to lead the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State in Myanmar. The region was poor and torn by ethnic conflict, with violence directed at the Rohingya Muslim minority. Many Myanmar Buddhists opposed the commission as unwelcome interference. In the week of the 24th of August 2017, the commission released its final report. Its recommendations pleased none of the sides, and violence exploded, driving most of the Rohingya from Myanmar. Annan tried to engage the United Nations and failed.

  In 2018 the civilian government under State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi convened an implementation board that never carried out the recommendations. Surakiart Sathirathai and Bill Richardson resigned from it, with Richardson among those who decried it as a "whitewash".

  Annan's other work ranged widely. He chaired the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security, launched in May 2011 with 12 members including Ernesto Zedillo, Martti Ahtisaari, Madeleine Albright and Amartya Sen. Its report on election integrity appeared in September 2012. As a founding commissioner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, he backed its 2011 finding that the war on drugs had failed. He compared regulating drugs to the regulation of tobacco. He chaired the Africa Progress Panel, whose 2014 report highlighted fisheries, agriculture and forests, and whose 2015 report examined climate change and renewable energy. He also played a pivotal role in a WHO resolution on halving the burden of snakebite by the late 2020s.

  As chair of The Elders, he travelled with Jimmy Carter and Graça Machel in November 2008 to assess Zimbabwe, but they were refused entry and worked from Johannesburg instead. On the 16th of October 2014 in Dublin, he told 1,300 young leaders from 191 countries: "tomorrow begins today". On the 4th of September 2012, Penguin Press published his memoir Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, written with Nader Mousavizadeh.

  Annan died on the morning of the 18th of August 2018 in Bern, Switzerland, aged 80, after a short illness. António Guterres called him "a global champion for peace" and "a guiding force for good". On the 10th of September his coffin, draped in the blue UN flag, arrived at Accra International Airport, accompanied by his widow Nane and his children. His body lay in state on the 11th and the 12th of September, and a state funeral followed on the 13th. A private burial at Burma Camp's new Military Cemetery included the Last Post and a 17-gun salute.

  He had received the Four Freedoms Award in 2004 and the Max Schmidheiny Foundation Freedom Prize in 2006. In 2010 the World Food Prize Foundation gave him the Norman E. Borlaug Medallion. Nane donated his Nobel medal and diploma to the UN office in Geneva. The UN Postal Administration issued a memorial stamp, with a portrait by Martin Mörck, on the 31st of May 2019. At Macalester College, where he once studied on a Ford Foundation grant, the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship now carries his name.

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