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.