Remembering Kofi Annan

REGINALD DUMAS

Part 2

KOFI ANNAN has often been called a “peacemaker extraordinaire.” It’s a description with which nearly all would agree. Not all. Jaundiced opinions of him were making the rounds even before he became the UN secretary-general (SG) in 1997.

He was the under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations at the time of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which over 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, were slaughtered (in only 100 days). The UN was accused of ignoring the recommendation of its force commander in Rwanda for pre-emptive action, and the finger of blame was pointed at Annan personally.

The following year, 1995, saw the massacre at Srebenica, in the former Yugoslavia, of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Christian Serbs. Again, Annan and the UN came under attack. Again, their reputations suffered.

Then in February 1998, now SG, he went to Baghdad to discuss with Saddam Hussein the situation of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. He thought he had made a breakthrough, and was welcomed back at his New York headquarters like a rock star. Perhaps overwhelmed by the moment, he allowed himself an unaccustomed euphoria: Saddam, he said, was “a man (he could) do business with.”

The trouble was that no one could “do business” with Saddam, unless it was in the context of enhancing his political power and financial assets. Even more narcissistic than Donald Trump (a concept many may find difficult to grasp), he was ruthless, murderous, corrupt, and untrustworthy. The agreement Annan believed he had with him quickly unravelled.

The year 1998 wouldn’t turn out to be a good for Annan. In May he visited Rwanda to face the music on the charge of UN inaction during the 1994 ethnic cleansing of Tutsis. It was a courageous thing to do, but what he heard certainly wasn’t music to his ears: the Rwandans savaged him and the UN. The next year, 1999, they would consider themselves vindicated by the finding of an independent investigation that the UN had indeed failed them five years earlier.

Annan’s opponents and unenthusiasts were now wallowing in self-righteous sentiment. For them, he had been repeatedly proven wrong, and was thus unfit for high office – nice fellow, but really not up to it. A February 1999 article by David Rieff in The New Republic titled “The indecent decent man” was contemptuous: “His gift is not for moral candor or moral leadership. It is merely a diplomatic gift, which is to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable positions… Annan is the perfect representative of (the UN’s) insular, apologetic culture of self-justification and self-exoneration.” Worse was to come.

In February 2003 the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the UN General Assembly that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was therefore a danger to the world. Directly after, in March, came the US-led invasion of Iraq by the so-called “coalition of the willing,” then the discovery that Saddam possessed nothing of the sort. Powell’s UN performance had been – if I may slightly distort a phrase from the late Rex Nettleford – a matchless weapon of mass distraction. Even worse was to come.

The next year, Annan publicly criticised the Iraq invasion, declaring it “illegal”: it hadn’t been sanctioned by the UN. The immediate howls for his head coming from US conservatives could be heard all over the world. Who was this bureaucrat to lecture us? After all, wasn’t the US “the indispensable nation” (a term popularised earlier by the Democrat Madeleine Albright)? And wasn’t being in the right (not to mention on it) a prime characteristic of indispensability? Yet worse was to come.

Also in 2004, Annan’s son Kojo and others were accused of having illicitly benefitted from the Iraq “oil-for-food” programme, under which Iraqi oil was sold under UN auspices to finance the purchase of humanitarian goods for the Iraqi people. Annan was said to have facilitated Kojo in the alleged fraud (Kojo denied everything).

No longer a “nice fellow” (though still “ineffectual”), but now vilified as a crook, Annan established an independent investigating committee under Paul Volcker, a former US Federal Reserve chairman. In its 2005 report, the committee said it had “found no corruption by the Secretary-General,” but added: “His behavior has not been exonerated by any stretch of the imagination.” It was a reference to the UN’s mismanagement of the programme, but it obviously wasn’t a lusty endorsement of Annan.

Calls from US hardliners for his departure were reaching a crescendo: “The flagship of international diplomacy ran aground while Kofi Annan was at the helm,” sneered one Republican Congressman. Others were not too far behind.

So how, with all these negatives, can Annan credibly be described as a “peacemaker extraordinaire?” I shall come to that next.