Kofi Annan: Former UN chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
TRIBUTES are being paid to one of Africa’s most famous political figures. After working for many years leading the United Nations, Kofi Annan has died at the age of 80. His family said he died after a short illness yesterday morning.
“It is with immense sadness that the Annan family and the Kofi Annan Foundation announce that Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Laureate, passed away peacefully on Saturday 18th August after a short illness,” the foundation said in a statement.
“His wife Nane and their children Ama, Kojo and Nina were by his side during his last days,” it said.
Current UN chief Antonio Guterres voiced deep sadness at the news, describing his predecessor as “a guiding force for good”.
The Ghanaian national, who lived in Switzerland, was a career diplomat who projected quiet charisma and is widely credited for raising the world body’s profile in global politics during his two terms as UN chief. It was at his elite boarding school in West Africa that Kofi Annan — the man who would later become the world’s top diplomat — learnt one of his most important lessons.
It was, he said later, “that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere”. The idea seems to have inspired Annan throughout a life which saw him play a key role in the crises which have shaped the world, from the HIV/ Aids pandemic, to the Iraq War and, latterly, climate change.
His humanitarian work would win him a Nobel Peace Prize, but it would also win him a raft of critics. Annan, the first black African to lead the United Nations, would nonetheless became one of the most enduring and recognised diplomats in modern history.
Changing times
Kofi Atta Annan and his sister, Efua Atta, were born in the city of Kumasi in what was then Gold Coast in April 1938. The twins’ first names meant “born on a Friday” in Akan, while their shared middle name means “twin”.
He grew up in a wealthy family — his grandfathers were traditional leaders, while his father became a provincial governor — in a country still under British rule. Then, two days before the future diplomat turned 19, the country finally won its independence, becoming Ghana. The impact on Annan’s later life cannot be underestimated.
“I walked away as a young man convinced that change is possible, even radical revolutionary change,” Annan told a group in Canada in 2012.
After studying at university, first in the newly liberated Ghana, followed by Macalester College in the US, he got his first job with the UN. The position — a budget officer with the World Health Organisation (WHO) — gave no hint as to the career he was to have over the next four decades, culminating in 1997 when he was elected secretarygeneral. But before he got there, he would face one of the biggest scandals of his career.
Genocide
By 1993, Annan had risen to the post of secretarygeneral and head of peacekeeping.
The next year, up to 800 000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred in 100 days in Rwanda. Then, in 1995, up to 8 000 Muslims were executed by Serbian forces in a so-called UN safe area in Bosnia.
In both cases, Annan and his department came under fire — especially after it emerged that his department had largely ignored information that had been passed to them, warning that the Rwandan genocide was being planned. On the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Annan acknowledged his shortcomings.
“I myself, as head of the UN’s peacekeeping department at the time, pressed dozens of countries for troops,” he said in 2004. “I believed at that time that I was doing my best. But I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could, and should, have done to sound the alarm and rally support. This painful memory, along with that of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has influenced much of my thinking, and many of my actions, as secretarygeneral.”
Despite this, in 1997, at the age of 59, Annan would succeed Boutros Boutros-Ghali as UN secretarygeneral.
Conflict
Annan had inherited an organisation which, after 52 years, was on the brink of bankruptcy. He set about reforming the institution, cutting 1 000 jobs out of 6 000 positions at the New York head
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