Man of few words, Annan seeks reelection at UN
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters): A soft-spoken straight-talker, Kofi Atta Annan of Ghana has achieved the feat of walking through UN political minefields nearly unscathed, gaining diplomatic superstar status in the process.
A member of a merchant family from the Fante ethnic group and married to a Swedish artist and lawyer, Annan, who turns 63 next month, announced on Thursday he would seek another five years as UN secretary-general. His term expires in December.
His first years in office were marked by a struggle to get Washington to pay what it owed to the world body in dues. That was nearly solved late last year when the UN General Assembly agreed to cut U.S. payments.
Making his announcement, Annan listed as his achievements reform of the UN bureaucracy, "trying to define a new agenda for the United Nations" in enhancing peacekeeping staff, stressing human rights and pounding rich countries to open their markets to African nations.
He stirred up controversy and admiration two years ago when he asked the General Assembly whether governments could hide behind sovereignty in the face of gross human rights violations, even if military intervention were involved.
But some of the same intractable problems that plagued his predecessors remained: he brokered talks between Indonesia and Portugal that led to independence and a UN administration for East Timor but could not avert a bloodbath that was only stopped by the intervention of Australian troops in 1999.
He fielded a large peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone which is wobbling back on track after some 500 UN soldiers were taken captive last May by rebels.
And he is still struggling with Iraq, where the UN Security Council is divided. He conducted a 1998 peace mission to Baghdad, speaking to President Saddam Hussein, an action that resulted in further arms probes but then collapsed.
The United States had faulted him for the visit and that gained him points for some independence from Washington, which had helped him to power after vetoing his predecessor, Egyptian Boutros-Boutros Ghali for a second term.
Annan also has been one of the few UN officials accepted by Israel as well as Palestinian leaders as a man of goodwill, though his role in the peace process has been marginal.
"It sometimes seems as if the United Nations serves all the world's peoples but one: the Jews," he said in late 1999, adding that Israel sometimes received a more intense focus than other comparable situations elicited.
Before assuming the world's top diplomatic post in 1997, Annan was a personnel director, a security coordinator, a budget director, a program manager, a controller and a refugee agency executive, to name a few of his positions.
He became head of peacekeeping in 1993 -- presiding over the department's worst moments during the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda. But rarely was he blamed for the disasters. He commissioned major reports on what went wrong in both countries and apologized on behalf of the United Nations.
Annan was born a twin, the third of five children on April 8, 1938. He spent his early childhood in Bekwai, near Kumasi, the inland capital of the pre-colonial Ashanti empire.
Educated at the University of Science and Technology in Kimas, he first left home in 1959 on a Ford Foundation grant to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he received a bachelor's' degree in economics.
He studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva after which he joined the World Health Organization. From 1965 to 1971, he worked for the Ethiopia-based Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa.
Then, at age 33, Annan said he had enough. "I went through my mid-life crisis very early and needed to sit back and do some thinking." He did this at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a master's degree in management.
In 1974 he returned to Ghana as managing director of the country's tourism agency but by 1976 he was at the United Nations in New York and in Geneva where he worked for the high commissioner for refugees.
His first marriage to a Nigerian ended in divorce. In 1994 he married the former Nane Lagergren, a Swedish lawyer and judge before she became a painter.
Her mother is the sister of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis in Hungary near the end of the Second World War. Annan speaks often of Wallenberg, asking how come so few "dared to risk their lives to save others."
The Annans, have three adult children, a daughter Ama and a son Kojo from his first marriage and a daughter Nina from her previous marriage.