Kofi Annan, nice guy negotiator

Kofi Annan, nice guy negotiator

Claire Harvey, Contributor, Jakarta

Kofi Annan describes himself as "the soft-spoken, gentle lamb"
of global politics. The United Nations secretary-general is
widely praised for his calm negotiating skills, his courteous
diplomatic tact and his compassion for the poor and the
oppressed.

But in one of the world's most important jobs, is being a nice
guy enough?

As Annan arrives in Indonesia on Friday for talks with
President Megawati Soekarnoputri, to be followed by a trip to
Dili for East Timor's independence celebrations, the United
Nations is facing some of its most difficult problems in years.

Israel crashes through the Palestinian territories, ignoring
UN resolutions and Annan's increasingly strident calls for
restraint. The United States and its allies in the so-called "war
on terror" comb the world for suspected Muslim militants as
Islamic nations look on nervously. And the queue of miserable
refugees, caught up in the grindingly slow UN bureaucracy, grows
every day.

Annan has been UN secretary-general since January 1997, the
first black African to hold the post. He is also the first UN
chief to rise through the ranks of the organization's massive
bureaucracy.

Born in Kumasi, Ghana, on April 8, 1938, Annan is descended
from chiefs of the Fante tribe. His father was not himself a
chief, but served as commissioner of the local Ashanti region.

Annan went to Ghana's most exclusive boarding school and began
his tertiary education at the University of Science and
Technology in the regional city of Kumasi.

The young economics student was not involved in university
politics or in Ghana's growing independence struggle. Instead, he
concentrated on his studies and at the age of 20 won a
scholarship to finish his degree in the United States, at
Macalester College in Minnesota.

Annan had already developed his trademark elegance. Despite
the blistering cold, he swore never to wear the hideous earmuffs
donned by locals. One freezing day, he nearly lost those
uncovered ears to frostbite -- and learned a valuable lesson.
"Never walk into an environment and assume that you understand it
better than the people who live there," Annan said in later
years, describing how he became a devotee of fluffy earmuffs, no
matter how unfashionable.

He joined the United Nations in 1962, aged 24, and moved
through the ranks, running management and economic affairs for
agencies including the Economic Commission for African Affairs,
the World Health Organization, the UN Emergency Force and the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees. During the Persian Gulf War of
the early 1990s, Annan was widely praised for negotiating the
release of U.S. hostages in Baghdad.

In 1993 Annan was appointed to run the UN's peacekeeping
operations -- a task which proved enormously difficult as UN
troops became mired in violent and protracted civil wars in
Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda.

In November 1995 he was sent to Bosnia to supervise the
handover of peacekeeping duties to the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), a job which involved placating demands for a
renegotiation of peace agreements by disgruntled warriors on both
sides of the conflict.

Annan's credentials as an economic manager -- particularly his
terms as assistant secretary-general for the UN's financial
affairs and human resources divisions and as financial
comptroller of the organization -- were crucial in getting the
job as secretary-general.

By the end of 1996 the UN was in financial crisis, with the
U.S. blocking the reappointment of secretary-general Boutros
Boutros-Ghali and refusing to pay more than US$1.5 billion in
unpaid dues unless the organization was reformed.

Annan was seen by the U.S. as a credible reformer. He was also
popular with French-speaking nations, who appreciated his
language skills.

Within months of taking the job, Annan had fulfilled his early
promise. He streamlined the UN's cumbersome bureaucracy, cutting
1,000 of 6,000 workers from the New York headquarters and
establishing a Cabinet-style system to replace the old-fashioned
narrow hierarchy where heads of the various programs reported
only to the secretary-general.

His successes include persuading Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein to allow UN weapons inspectors to visit top-secret sites
in 1998, negotiating an agreement with Libya to allow suspects in
the Lockerbie bombing to be tried and finalizing Israel's pullout
from Lebanon in 2000. He is a vocal advocate for developed
nations to provide meaningful aid to developing countries and for
efforts to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa.

In the face of mounting protests against globalization, he
appointed himself a spokesman for the downtrodden earlier this
year at the World Economic Forum in New York.

The problem of the poor "is not that they are included in the
global market but that they are excluded from it", he said,
urging a more responsible approach to including the whole world
in economic development.

Annan, who has three children, married Swedish lawyer and
artist Nane Lagergren in 1985 after the breakup of an earlier
marriage to a fellow Ghanaian.

Human rights are likely to dominate Annan's present tour of
Indonesia and East Timor.

In 1999, Annan strongly pressured Indonesia to allow UN
peacekeepers into East Timor and was among the harshest critics
of Indonesia's failure to prevent killing sprees by pro-Jakarta
militiamen. "I want to express my most profound revulsion at the
murder, mayhem and destruction," he said on a visit to Dili in
2000. "I wish we could have prevented or contained it."

His last visit to Indonesia was in February 2000, when he
urged then-president Abdurrahman Wahid to ensure the perpetrators
of human rights violations in East Timor were pursued through the
courts.

To date, 18 police officers and military soldiers have been
charged over the violence -- but some senior figures have not
been pursued, such as former Indonesian Military chief Gen. (ret)
Wiranto, who was described as "morally responsible" for the
bloodshed by an independent Indonesian investigative commission
in 2000.