Kofi Annan
7th Secretary-General of the United Nations
In office January 1, 1997 – January 1, 2007
Preceded by Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Succeeded by Ban Ki-moon
Born April 8, 1938 (1938-04-08) (age 70)
Kumasi, Gold Coast
Nationality Ghanaian
Spouse Titi Alakija (divorced)
Nane Maria Annan
Religion Christian, Protestant[1]
United Nations portal
Kofi Atta Annan, GCMG (born April 8, 1938) is a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1, 1997 to January 1, 2007. Annan and the United Nations were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.
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Early years and family
Kofi Annan was born to Victoria and Henry Reginald Annan in the Kofandros section of Kumasi, Ghana. He is a twin, a respected status in Ghanaian culture. His twin sister Efua Atta, who died in 1991, shares the middle name ‘Atta’, which in Fante and Akan means ‘twin’.
Annan’s family was part of the country’s elite; both of his grandfathers and his uncle were tribal chiefs. His father was Asante and Fante; his mother was Fante. Annan’s father worked for a long period as an export manager for the Lever Brothers cocoa company.[citation needed]
Annan is married to Nane Maria Annan, a Swedish lawyer and artist who is the half-niece of Raoul Wallenberg. He has two children, Kojo and Ama, from his previous marriage to a Nigerian woman, Titi Alakija, whom he divorced in the late 1970s. Annan also has one stepchild, Nina Cronstedt de Groot, Nane’s daughter from a previous marriage.
Name
As with most Akan names, his first name indicates the day of the week he was born: Kofi denotes a boy born on a Friday. His middle name Atta is that of an elder twin. The name Annan can indicate that a child was the fourth in the family, but in Annan’s family at some time in the past it became a family name, which Annan inherited from his parents.[citation needed]
In his earlier years at the UN, Annan’s last name had widely been mispronounced as rhyming with “anon”; Annan has let it be known that he pronounces his name to rhyme with “cannon”
Education
From 1954 to 1957, Annan attended the elite Mfantsipim school, a Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in the 1870s. Annan has said that the school taught him “that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere”. In 1957, the year Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, Ghana became the first British colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence.
In 1958, Annan began studying for a degree in economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology of Ghana. He received a Ford Foundation grant, enabling him to complete his undergraduate studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, in 1961. Annan then did a DEA degree in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Institut universitaire des hautes études internationales IUHEI) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1961–62, later attending the MIT Sloan School of Management (1971–72) Sloan Fellows program and receiving a Master of Science (M.S.) degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Annan is fluent in English, French, Kru, other dialects of Akan, and other African languages.
Early career
In 1962, Annan started working as a Budget Officer for the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations. From 1974 to 1976, he worked as the Director of Tourism in Ghana. Annan then returned to work for the United Nations as an Assistant Secretary-General in three consecutive positions: Human Resources Management and Security Coordinator, from 1987 to 1990; Program Planning, Budget and Finance, and Controller, from 1990 to 1992; and Peacekeeping Operations, from March 1993 to February 1994.
The chain of events which lead up to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide unfolded while Annan was heading up Peacekeeping Operations. In his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Canadian ex-General Roméo Dallaire, who was force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, claims that Annan was overly passive in his response to the incipient genocide. Gen. Dallaire explicitly asserts that Annan held back U. N. troops from intervening to settle the conflict, and from providing more logistical and material support. In particular, Dallaire claims that Annan failed to provide any responses to his repeated faxes asking him for access to a weapons depository, something that could have helped defend the endangered Tutsis. Dallaire concedes, however, that Annan was a man whom he found extremely “committed” to the founding principles of the United Nations.
Annan served as Under-Secretary-General until October 1995, when he was made a Special Representative of the Secretary-General to the former Yugoslavia, serving for five months in that capacity before returning to his duties as Under-Secretary-General in April 1996.
Appointment
On December 13, 1996, Annan was recommended by the United Nations Security Council to replace the previous Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, whose second term faced the veto of the United States.[3][4] He was confirmed four days later by the vote of the General Assembly,[5] and he started his first term as Secretary-General on January 1, 1997.
Activities
Mark Malloch Brown succeeded Louise Frechette as Annan’s Deputy Secretary-General in April 2004.
In April 2001, he issued a five-point “Call to Action” to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As Secretary-General, Annan saw this pandemic as a “personal priority” and proposed the establishment of a Global AIDS and Health Fund in an attempt to stimulate the increased spending needed to help developing countries confront the HIV/AIDS crisis.
On December 10, 2001, Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world”.
During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Annan called on the United States and the United Kingdom not to invade without the support of the United Nations. In a September 2004 interview on the BBC, Annan was asked about the legal authority for the invasion, and responded, “from our point of view, from the charter point of view it was illegal.”[6][7]
Annan supported sending a UN peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Sudan, and worked with the government of Sudan to accept a transfer of power from the African Union peacekeeping mission to a UN one. Annan also worked with several Arab and Muslim countries on women’s rights and other topics. Nuala O’Loan, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland recently stated, “I imagine that if Kofi Annan saw somebody abusing human rights he would kick them in the knee”.[citation needed]
Beginning in 1998 Annan convened an annual UN Security Council Retreat with 15 States representatives of the Council at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) Conference Center at the Rockefeller family estate at Pocantico, which was sponsored by both the RBF and the UN.[8] He and his wife also attended the Playhouse at the family estate on the occasion of Brooke Astor’s 100th birthday celebration.[9] He is a strong supporter and guest of the family’s Asia Society in New York.[10]
Oil-for-Food scandal
In December 2004, reports surfaced that the Secretary-General’s son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection SA, which won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation into this matter.
The Independent Inquiry Committee into The United Nations Oil-for-Food Program was appointed by Annan[12] and led by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker;[13] Volcker has strong ideological ties to the UN as director of the United Nations Association of the United States of America. In his first interview with the Inquiry Committee, Annan denied having had a meeting with Cotecna. Later in the inquiry he recalled that he had met with Cotecna’s chief executive Elie-Georges Massey twice. In a final report issued on October 27, the committee found insufficient evidence to indict Kofi Annan on any illegal actions, but did find fault with Mr. Benan Sevan, a Cypriot national who had worked for the UN for about 40 years. Appointed to his Oil-For-Food role by Kofi Annan, Mr. Sevan repeatedly asked Iraqis for allocations of oil to the African Middle East Petroleum Company. Sevan’s behavior was “ethically improper”, Volcker said to reporters. Sevan for his part, has repeatedly denied the charges and argues that he is being made a “scapegoat”. The Volcker report was also highly critical of the UN management structure and the Security Council oversight and strongly recommended a new position of Chief Operating Officer to handle the fiscal and administrative responsibilities which currently fall to the Secretary General’s office. The report listed the companies, both Western and Middle Eastern, who illegally benefited from the program.
Conflict between the United States and the United Nations
Kofi Annan supported his deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown, who openly criticized segments of the United States media in a speech on June 6, 2006: “But [the UN's role in peacekeeping] is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. The prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable…. You will lose the UN one way or another.”[14] The U.S. ambassador John R. Bolton was reported to have told Annan on the phone: “I’ve known you since 1989 and I’m telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time.”[15] At the end of Kofi Annan’s tenure as Secretary General, Bolton was asked to sum up Annan’s years at the UN. He responded simply: “I’ll pass.”[2] However, despite criticism of the United States by one of the United Nations’ top officials, the U.S. remained, and remains, the largest single contributor of funds to the United Nations in the world.[16]
