SECRETARY
PROFILE
Submitted to the English
Lesson
Written by :
Ria
Vinola Widia Wati
Reg.Number 8143136659
FACULTY OF
ECONOMICS AND ADMINISTRATION
STATE UNIVERSITY OF
JAKARTA
2013
Biography of United Nations
Secretary–General Kofi Annan
Profile
:
In office
1 January 1997 – 31 December 2006
1 January 1997 – 31 December 2006
United
Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria
In office
23 February 2012 – 31 August 2012
23 February 2012 – 31 August 2012
Preceded by :
Position established
Personal details
Nationality :
Ghanaian
Spouse(s) :
Titi Alakija (1965–late 1970s) & Nane Lagergren (1984–present)
Relations :
Anthony Gildas Kofi Annan
Alma mater : Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
Macalester College Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Macalester College Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Religion :
Protestantism
Born
April 8, 1938; married (1), divorced; married (2) Nane Cronstedt, 1984;
children: one son, one daughter, one stepdaughter
Education: Macalester College, St. Paul, Minn, BEcon, 1961; Institut des Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationale, Switzerland, 1961-62; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan Fellow, MSc Mgmt, 1972.
Education: Macalester College, St. Paul, Minn, BEcon, 1961; Institut des Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationale, Switzerland, 1961-62; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan Fellow, MSc Mgmt, 1972.
Career
World Health Organization, administrative and
budget officer, 1962; Ghana Tourism Control Board, managing director, 1974-76;
United Nations Office of Personnel Services, New York, NY, deputy chief of
staff services, 1976-80; United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
(UNHCR), deputy director of administration and head of personnel, Geneva,
Switzerland, 1980-83; United Nations Office of Finance, director of budget,
1984-87; United Nations Office of Human Resources Management, assistant
secretary general, 1987-90; United Nations assistant secretary general for
program planning, 1990-92; United Nations budget and finance controller,
1992-1993; United Nations undersecretary for peacekeeping, 1993-1996; United
Nations secretary-general, 1996-.
Life's
Work
On December 18, 1996, the clink of raised champagne glasses rang through the United Nations (UN)
headquarters in New York City. The celebration was to honor incoming Secretary
General Kofi Annan, the first black African ever to have held the difficult
job. His election was greeted with genuine pleasure by UN insiders, who admire
him for his unswerving integrity, his cool
judgment in the toughest emergencies, and his ability to learn valuable lessons
from every situation in which he finds himself. His colleagues had plenty of
time to assess Annan's strengths. Other than a two-year period in the mid-1970s
when he returned to his native Ghana to run the Tourism Control Board, Annan
has devoted his entire career to the international organization. Annan's first
years in office went smoothly. After the turn of the new
millennium, though, things started to fall apart as Annan was dogged by a
series of scandals that occurred under his watch, most of them involving the
UN's Oil-for-Food program with Iraq. By 2004 U.S. officials were calling for
his resignation, though Annan remained steadfast in his determination to restore credibility to himself and the UN before his term
expired at the end of 2006.
Over the course of his four decades of
service in the UN, Annan has seen the number of troubled areas around the world
multiply. Governments have toppled in Africa; blood
has stained highly-coveted lands in Europe; Soviet Communism has collapsed, and
with it, the grim wall separating East and West Berlin; and the Middle East has
exploded in violence. Each change has left in its wake a flood of desperate
refugees who depend on the UN for basic humanitarian aid such as food, shelter
and medical services.
The huge challenges of assessing these urgent needs, working out suitable strategies for
humanitarian aid, and helping to keep peace between warring factions everywhere
have taken Annan all over the world. By turns he has visited Iraq, Bosnia,
Somalia, Rwanda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Switzerland. Along the way he has
gained a comfortable familiarity with English, French, and several African
languages. Constant traveling has also taught him a great deal about the
ancient traditions by which many people live, and the ways in which they buckle when changes overwhelm them. Well-versed in
several ways of life besides his own, he can truly be considered a citizen of
the world.
Early
Activism
Kofi Annan spent his boyhood years in
Africa's Gold Coast, which was then shedding its 70-year-old status as a
British crown colony in favor of an up-to-the minute identity as an independent
West African country named Ghana. The country's mood about the future was optimistic, and young Annan was right in step. A
self-confident leader even as a teenager, he undertook his first successful
human rights mission while at boarding school, participating in a hunger strike
to protest the poor quality of the food there.
That first experience as an activist was so
satisfying that Annan continued to take an interest in public service after he
entered Ghana's University of Science and Technology, where he studied
economics. In 1957, while serving as vice president of the Ghana Students'
Union, he happened to visit Sierre Leone for a meeting of student leaders.
There he caught the attention of a talent scout from the Ford Foundation's
Foreign Students Leadership Project. A scholarship swiftly followed, and Annan
was soon on his way to the United States to finish his economics degree at
Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Annan graduated in 1961, but did not return
to his homeland. Instead he became a staff member at the United Nations,
embarking upon a series of jobs that gave him valuable experience in the two
vitally important areas of finance and human resources management. The first rung of the UN ladder took him to Geneva,
Switzerland, where he became a budget administration officer for the World
Health Organization. Next, after acquiring a master's degree in management at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 1971-72, he spent four years
in the UN's Office of Personnel Services in New York. In 1980, he went back to
Switzerland, where he spent the following three years as head of personnel for
the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR).
Led
the UNHCR
The UNHCR is often the only place in which
refugees in war-ravaged countries can turn for help with such basic necessities
as food and medical care. During 1980 to 1983, the years Annan spent there, its
staff members left the Geneva headquarters for Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia,
and Hong Kong; they were also sent to Italy, Greece, and Iraq. All in all, UNHCR personnel were able to ease the suffering of
more than three million terrified refugees.
While the daily catalog of international anguish was enough to spur Annan to work as hard as
possible, even more incentive came from his friendship
with Nane Cronstedt, a lawyer who became his second wife in 1984. The
inspiration came from Cronstedt's family background. She was a niece of the
revered Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who had snatched 5,000 Jews from
Adolph Hitler's death camps during World War II. Though a 35-year span
separated Wallenberg's mysterious 1945 disappearance in Russia and his niece's
friendship with Annan, his wartime bravery was still a matter of breathless awe for Annan.
Annan felt a special message for humanity was
present in Wallenberg's selfless heroism. It began, he
felt, with the diplomat's pivotal role as a bystander who had been free to choose whether he would
turn a blind eye to the Nazis or fight them. Unmoved by his personal danger,
Wallenberg had chosen to sacrifice himself rather than turn his back on the agony of Hitler's trapped and helpless human targets. Annan believed the whole
wartime saga provided an important example of immortal integrity. "His
kind of intervention gives hope to the victims, encourages them to fight and
resist, helps them to hang on and bear witness, and hopefully arouses our collective conscience,"
Annan remarked in 1997, while opening a monument to Wallenberg in London.
Rose
through the Ranks at the UN
In January of 1993, after a year as assistant
secretary general for Peacekeeping Operations, Annan was promoted. Now, as
undersecretary, he held authority over 80,000 troops, dispatching them anywhere
they were needed in order to spare lives and restore calm between warring
factions. At that time, the UN had 13 peacekeeping missions in progress.
Longest-standing was the Middle East operation, which had been monitoring the
sporadic Arab-Israeli cease-fires since 1948. Thereafter, in chronological order,
came UN observation on the tense India-Pakistan border, dating back to January
of 1949; the same kind of operation in Cyprus, Greece (initiated in March of
1964); the Golan Heights (1974) and Lebanon (1978).
In the scant two years since the
beginning of the 1990s, the UN had also become a formidable presence on the
Iraq-Kuwait border, as well as in Angola, El Salvador, Cambodia, and
Mozambique. Other urgent missions were appearing on the horizons of Eastern
Europe's former Yugoslavia and Somalia, the land that sits directly on the horn
of the African continent.
Annan was well-acquainted with the problems
of Somalia--a rudderless state that had existed since without a government
since the toppling of President Siad Barre in 1991. Somalia had begun to writhe in the grip of power struggles by so many
opposition parties that the entire infrastructure of the country had been
completely destroyed. In a country with a literacy rate of only 20 percent, the
lack of expertise in engineering made replacement impossible, so the loss of
the public buildings, bridges, and roads was an inestimable loss. But a far greater tragedy was the
smell of death that hung in the air. In just the six months between September
of 1991 and March of 1992, the Mogadishu area alone had suffered the injury of
27,000 people and an estimated 14,000 more had been killed.
As if the civil war was not enough for
Somalis to bear, their problems were further complicated by a persistent drought. News reports everywhere showed long lines
of emaciated people streaming
desperately out of the country in search of food. By September of 1992, an
estimated 500,000 refugees had poured into neighboring Ethiopia, with an additional
300,000 flooding into Kenya; 65,000 heading for Yemen; and about 115,000
scattered elsewhere.
Dealt
with Famine
During the month of August, the UN
spearheaded a famine relief operation for the
1.5 million people who were teetering dangerously on the edge of starving to death. By early November, the UNHCR was
ready to launch a large-scale rescue operation called UNOSOM, which consisted of setting up camps just
outside the country to feed about 65,000 Somalian refugees. Yet even though the
UN was quickly flying in the most capacious emergency food stores that could be
supplied, the suffering Somalis could not rest easily.
In Mogadishu and other major cities, the unarmed victims were often chased away by looting
bandits, who had dusted off the weapons the country had received in the early
1980s to give it greater power in a territorial struggle against Ethiopia. Now,
as the coveted grain and flour steadily disappeared into the bandits' hands,
the UN saw only one solution--to augment the 500 Pakistani soldiers previously
authorized by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Before long another
3,500 troops were on their way to Africa.
Because the United States was seen by Somalis
as the only country capable of staving off the inevitable national tragedy, on
November 21, 1992, U.S. president George Bush also sent military units to
Somalia. Arriving under the banner of "Operation Restore Hope," the
first troops landed on December 9, to be joined for a New Year's Day visit by
President Bush himself. By mid-January the number of foreign troops in the
country was soaring towards the 18,000 troops
from 21 nations, and phase two of the operation called United Nations
Operations Somalia, or UNOSOM II, was under way, with the hope that the
leaderless country would be turned over to United Nations control by May 4,
1993.
But under the influence of a faction leader
named Mohammed Farah Aideed, the gratitude of the Somalis began to turn to resentment and a fear that the foreign troops were
heralding a return to the British and Italian colonial influence that the
country had experienced in the early years of the century. Seizing the
opportunity to consolidate his power, in June of 1993, Aideed attacked and
killed 25 UN soldiers. At this point, the United States decided to curtail its interest in Somalia.
UN
Acted as Peacemaker
United Nations troops being bound by the
United Nations Charter, they had traditionally gone on peacekeeping missions.
By these terms, UN troops were usually kept in place by agreement of both
conflicting parties and were armed only to an extent that would permit them to
defend themselves or their equipment. The situation in Somalia, however, was
different. Somalia boasted neither government nor rulers to consult, and no
well-defined conflicting parties existed that could be mediated. Therefore, the UN troops had no outside
authority to mediate their actions.
For the first time in history, the UN
Security Council sent their auxiliary troops into a conflict situation
buttressed by a UN Charter mandate. This meant they were allowed to act as
peacemakers rather than as mere peacekeepers. By UN decree, they were
authorized to force Somalia to accept peace, even if they had to fight to
achieve it. The alteration in UN Charter mandate made this present peacekeeping
force the most aggressive in the history of the United Nations. Furthermore,
since 26 of the organization's 41 missions had been mounted since 1989,
controlling the forces and their movements was becoming an ever- mounting
challenge that the Peacekeeping Department was not equipped to handle. Annan
set out to remedy this situation by
instituting a streamlining effort.
First came a situation center to monitor the
department's international operations around the clock. In 1993, when it was
established, this office consisted of eight military officers and two
telephones placed in a Manhattan office. By the end of 1995, however, with 17
peacekeeping missions in progress, it was staffed by 120 officers, serving as ultimate backup
to 70,000 peacekeeping soldiers worldwide.
In a second innovation, Annan sought support
from member nations who were prepared to contribute troops and equipment for standby duty, in case peacekeeping efforts should be
needed for a sudden emergency. The high regard in which he is held was soon
obvious, when, by the end of November, 1996, 62 of the 185 members had agreed
to provide some 80,000 standby troops between them. Annan also created a
"lessons learned" unit within the Department of Peacekeeping
Operations to make sure that all phases of each operation are discussed, evaluated
and broadened further by interaction with other UN departments. Annan hoped the
new departmental wing would improve future operations and minimize avoidable
mistakes.
Worked
in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Supervising all these innovations made a
tight work schedule for Annan. Nevertheless, his workload became greater still in November of 1995,
when Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed him special
representative to the former Yugoslavia, a European territory soon to become
familiar as Bosnia-Herzegovina. This mission posed a grave responsibility for
Annan, who had been asked to coordinate a smooth transition of international
peacekeepers from United Nations forces to NATO military units.
Like Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina was an
international symbol of raw tragedy. Its two principal population groups, the
Serbs and the Croats, had been at war over possession of this area ever since
the breakup of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991. In the
course of a conflict that would eventually cost between 250,000 and 300,000
lives, they had brought such concepts as "ethnic cleansing," back into the limelight from the shadows of World War II, updating
them for the 1990s by "rationalizing" the expulsion and wholesale murder of the Bosnian Muslims. The slow torment of Bosnia-Herzegovina led first to an arms
embargo from the United Nations Security Council in September of 1991, then, in
May of 1992, to the arrival of peacekeeping and humanitarian forces, who
brought sanitation, water, and electricity to
the city of Sarajevo's residents.
While this desperately-needed aid was offered
without reservation, it came at a high cost to the UN itself. When accompanied
by the humanitarian aid that is part of the United Nations service,
peacekeeping is an exercise so expensive that by 1994 the annual budget had
reached a whopping $3.3 billion. And, generous as it seemed, escalating crises all over the world were stretching this
money so thin that the organization was sinking dangerously into debt.
A sinking monetary bottom line was one reason
that the UN decided to pass the Bosnian peacekeeping burden on to the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO). But this was only part of the story. Equally
important was the fact that NATO forces are solely dedicated to defense by
military means. This single focus was sorely needed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the
fragile "peace" could be more accurately described as a sullen cease-fire. In November of 1995, UN
Secretary- General Boutros-Ghali asked Annan to go to Bosnia to handle the
details of withdrawing UN forces and settling NATO forces in their place. It
was a difficult task to accomplish. Nevertheless, with his characteristic
energy and efficiency, Annan managed to achieve it within four months and
returned to his post at the UN by March of 1996.
Chosen
to Lead the UN
Meanwhile, Secretary General Boutros-Ghali
was nearing the end of his five-year term of office, and his re-election,
though acceptable to many of the UN's 185 members, was far from a done deal
with the United States. Though swimming against the tide of public opinion,
U.S. ambassador Madeleine Albright quickly made her country's objections known
to the UN Security Council, one of the most influential groups of policy-makers
in the world.
The Council itself consists of five permanent
members, plus ten who are voted onto the body periodically. Each of the
permanent five--China, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and the United
States--has the power of veto over all other votes, a
power Albright was now exercising. Furthermore, she emphasized her feelings by
encouraging the United States to withhold $1.4 billion in fees owed to the United
Nations. The charges of the United States against Boutros-Ghali were two-fold:
that he tended to follow his own path rather than the policies laid down by the
UN's members, and that he had ignored warnings that the UN and its soaring debt
were to be streamlined immediately.
Finding an alternative candidate to fill the
difficult post of secretary general became a necessity. As a UN insider with
more than 30 years of service under his belt, Annan was a natural choice,
easily hurdling France's objection, based incorrectly on the assumption that he
was not French-speaking. On December 18, 1996, Annan was welcomed into office
to serve, as he modestly put it, "185 masters" and to institute an
immediate cost-cutting program at the UN. On his own initiative, Annan also
established a public relations program to bring more rapport between the huge organization itself and the
international public. As he remarked at his pre-celebration press conference,
Annan well understood that he was undertaking a huge challenge. But nobody
present doubted his ability to handle whatever the future might bring.
From his first days as Secretary General,
Annan has pursued an ambitious plan to renew the UN, maintained an
international commitment to Africa, sought to gain Iraqi compliance with
security standards, promoted Nigerian civil rule, sought to improve the status
of women in the Secretariat, and involved non-state organizations in
partnership with the UN. Annan has particularly excelled at involving many
different people in debates about world peace and how the UN might best fulfill
its mandate. In 1999 Annan published some interesting perspectives on world
peace when he served as a guest editor to Civilization magazine; he
prepared an issue entitled "How to Save the World," with essays from
contributors ranging from heads of nations to preeminent scholars. At the turn
of the century, Annan published a report called "We the Peoples: The Role
of the United Nations in the 21st Century," in which he detailed a plan
for UN member states to end poverty and inequality, improve education, reduce the incidence of
HIV/AIDS, protect the environment and humanity from violence. The report led to
the Millennium Declaration, a plan that has guided the United Nations into the
new millennium. For his efforts, Annan was honored with the United Nations in
2001 with a Nobel Peace Prize.
The bright spots, however, were quickly
dimmed as Annan's term continued. By the mid-2000s, he was plagued with several
scandals accumulating on the UN's doorstep. UN peacekeepers in the Congo were accused
of requiring sexual favors of girls and women who were dependent on them for
aid, and a high-ranking official at the UN's New York headquarters was accused
of sexual harassment. Plus, Annan and the UN
were accused of not reacting forcefully enough when it appeared that a genocide
could be occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan.
But the biggest scandal to happen on Annan's
watch was in the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program. The program was implemented after
the first Gulf War, when sanctions were placed on the regime
of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to prevent him from using oil money to
purchase weapons or other banned goods. However, Iraq was allowed to make
limited oil sales in order to raise money for food, medicine, and other goods
critical to the welfare of the Iraqi people. This program was overseen by the
UN, but, as it later came out, not very well. Estimates of the total volume of
corruption in the program varied, but a final report issue declared that Saddam
Hussein, himself, may have skimmed up to $21 billion out of the $64 billion
program. Many people and countries were tarred by their association with this
scandal, but Annan, as Secretary General, bore the ultimate oversight responsibility. Matters were not helped for
Annan when it was revealed that his son, Kojo, had received substantial payments from a
Swiss company, Cotecna Inspection Services, that was awarded a nearly $5 million
contract to help oversee the Oil-for-Food program.
U.S. officials called for Annan's
resignation, but Annan had enough support to stay on. In January of 2005,
seventy Nobel Prize winners from around the world even signed a letter publicly
praising Annan's tenure at the UN. "We commend Secretary-General Kofi
Annan for effectively leveraging his moral authority, independence, and
wisdom to elevate the United Nations to meet its highest principles," the
letter-writers declared.
Nonetheless, Annan remained under attack. In
the fall of 2005, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker released an
847-page scathing report on the oil-for-food
scandal. Following the report's release, Annan went before the UN Security
Council and took personal responsibility for his management failures. According
to Warren Hoge of the New York Times, a humbled Annan told the Security
Council, "The report is critical of me personally, and I accept the
criticism." While the report lambasted Annan for failing to curtail the
corruption and sloppy administration of the
program, it failed to prove that he was involved in the contract awarded to
Cotecna, which benefited his son financially. In conclusion, the report said
that the UN was in need of an extensive overhaul, particularly thorough
administrative reform, if it wanted to retain its global credibility. At stake,
the report said, was the organization's "ability to respond promptly and
effectively to the responsibilities thrust upon it by the realities of a
turbulent, and often violent, world."
Prior to the report's release, Annan
presented his own 62-page report to the UN outlining reforms he believed would
help restore UN credibility to meet the demands of the 21st century. Annan
called for expanding the UN Security Council, creating a definition of terrorism,
increasing foreign aid, and replacing the UN Commission on Human Rights with a
new Human Rights Council. Annan faced an uphill battle to persuade the 60-year-old body to
initiate the changes, though he hoped to rejuvenate his legacy by making headway on the proposals before his term ended in
2006.
Awards
Nobel Peace Prize, jointly awarded with
United Nations, 2001.
Further
Reading
Periodicals
- Buffalo News (Buffalo, New York), November 22, 1998.
- Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1993, p.10, November 29, 1994; December 18, 1996, p. 30; December 20, 1996, p. 31.
- Christian Science Monitor, April 6, 2005, p. 6.
- Civilization, June/July 1999.
- Commentary, May 2004, p. 15.
- Ebony, October 1998, p. 136.
- Economist, January 8, 2005, p. 31.
- Financial Times, December 21, 2004, p. 3.
- London Times, December 19, 1996, p. 17.
- New Republic, May 3, 2004, p. 38.
- New York Times, October 6, 1993, p. A17; December 14, 1996, p. 5; September 8, 2005, p. 10.
- Newsweek, December 23, 1996, p. 30; April 26, 2004, p. 6.
- Time, December 3, 1996, p. 51; November 30, 1998, p. 136.
- U.S. News & World Report, January 17, 2005, p. 34; January 24, 2005, p. 38.
- West Africa, December 23, 1996, p. 5; February 3, 1997, p. 181; February 3, 1997, p. 178.
On-line
- United Nations Secretary-General, www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/ (November 19, 2004).
Other
Additional information for this profile was
obtained from the United Nations Department of Public Information, "The UN
in Brief," July 3, 1997; "Press Conference by Secretary-General Elect
Kofi Annan," December 18, 1996, Transcript, GA/9212; "Secretary-General
warmly congratulates Kofi Annan on Receiving Security Council
Recommendation," December 13, 1996, SG/SM/6131; "Secretary-General
Says Monument to Raoul Wallenberg Is Inspiration to Act," SG/SM/6169.
