Earlier this week, the security council officially nominated Ban Ki-Moon, South Korea's foreign minister, to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations. Ban's nomination will shortly be rubber-stamped by the general assembly, and his term will begin on 1st January 2007.
But the new secretary-general will inherit an organisation in deep trouble; and much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the outgoing secretary-general, Kofi Annan. Six months ago, Annan's waning credibility was dealt a death blow by the UN general assembly. By an overwhelming majority, including most developing countries, the member states rejected his last reform proposal, aimed at placating a hostile America.
Following the vote, the African daily Fraternité Matin called Annan "the African who tries to please his white masters." For Annan it was a watershed. Having reaped the resentment of the Bush administration for not having supported the war in Iraq and the hostility of the Arab world for not having opposed it, Annan had now achieved the ultimate indignity; the scorn of the continent he represented.
Coming eight months before the end of his mandate, the rebuke carried for Annan no practical consequences. There were no longer cries for him to resign and he was assured of completing his term. But it was made all the more potent by coming only five years after he had, at the peak of his popularity, received the twin accolades of a Nobel peace prize and a triumphal re-election to a second term.
Annan joined the UN in 1962 and over the following 34 years slowly climbed the bureaucratic ladder to the position of under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations. During these years he stood out as a courteous and dedicated UN staff member who radiated calm and good fellowship, enjoyed life and was both liked and respected by all those he worked with. By nature he was also cautious to the point of risk-averse; he shunned confrontation and had a penchant for compromise, qualities that served him well in his functions as an international civil servant.
These qualities alone, however, would never have qualified him for the post of secretary-general had he not benefited from a constellation of circumstances outside his control. By early 1996, Washington had decided to block any re-election bid from the then secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Acknowledged as an intellectual giant, the Egyptian was also arrogant, abrasive and did not suffer fools, a category to which he relegated most of those who crossed his path.
Looking for a successor to Boutros-Ghali, the man who caught the eye of Richard Holbrooke, US ambassador to the UN, was Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping. Promoting one African to replace another African would ensure that Africa retain the post of secretary-general for the customary two terms allotted in rotation to each geographic group. Annan had no friends in Africa, but neither did he have any enemies; and with a friend in Washington, he did not need Africa.
A glut of prominent African candidates vied to replace Boutros-Ghali. But the African group proved incapable of reaching a consensus on any of them. So when Washington made it clear that it would use its veto to ensure that the choice would either be Annan or a non-African, the other African candidates withdrew from the race and the man whom Holbrooke had described as the one "we can work with" duly became UN secretary-general in January 1997.
Annan hit the ground running. His decades of UN experience meant that he needed no breaking-in period and he became operational overnight. Making his mark on the outside world, however, required more effort.
With its influential Jewish population, New York had little empathy for an organisation whose general assembly had, in 1975, adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism. Although the resolution was repealed after the fall of the Soviet Union, the unease lingered. To address that misgiving, Annan had a trump card: his wife.
The UN spin machine missed no opportunity to advertise the fact that Annan's Swedish wife Nane was the half-niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi gas chambers before disappearing in 1945 in a Soviet jail. The couple basked in the reflected glory of a true hero. The Wallenberg connection sold well and combined with his quiet demeanour, natural (and well-tailored) elegance, sing-song west African accent and the overall thoughtful benevolence that he radiated, it took little time for Annan to become the darling of New York's social scene. For a UN secretary-general, this was a first.
A full social calendar proved no impediment to Annan's work because work was not the main prerequisite of the post. The UN charter describes the secretary-general as "the chief administrative officer of the organisation." On paper this makes him an administrator. In practice, with political decisions being taken by the security council and management decisions having to be approved by an un-cooperative general assembly, his administrative authority is practically non-existent. Thus, ultimately, the job of a UN secretary-general is to do almost nothing but to do it well. This means not aggravating member states, making the right noises, lending presence to occasions which member states feel require the cosmetics of international endorsements and ensuring that administrative excesses are either kept in line or out of the limelight. To this end, the secretary-general benefits from the support of a large staff that includes a chief of cabinet, secretaries, special assistants, speechwriters, memo drafters, protocol officers and a cohort of advisers.
Annan brought a new dimension to the function of secretary-general. Rather than doing little but doing it well, in the absence of anything to do in the political arena, he did nothing but did it very well. The little that could have been done as regards management was left undone.
Meanwhile, the UN public information apparatus went into overdrive, inflating the position of secretary-general into the equivalent of a lay papacy. The "chief administrative officer" was now depicted as the "spokesman for the poor," the "symbol of UN ideals" and the upholder of the "moral authority" of the organisation. A fawning media fell into step. The New York Social Diary magazine, of which Annan had become a staple fare, portrayed him as "aristocratic" and his wife as "saintly"; America's Public Broadcasting Service made him into "a representative of the highest ideals of the world community," the New York Times marvelled at his "efficiency" while Time crowned his wife the "first lady of the world."
2001, the year when Annan's term was to end, proved his apotheosis. In the spring, governments unanimously decided to re-elect him for another five-year term despite the fact that his post would under usual rules have gone to an Asian. In autumn he received the Nobel peace prize for having "brought new life" to the UN.
Had Annan stepped down after one term, his standing would have achieved the mythical heights of a Gandhi, married to the likes of a Mother Teresa. But there was no reason to step down, and no injunction from member states to do so.
The Annan who started his second term in January 2002 was a changed man from the one Washington had chosen five years previously. "He believed he had a mission," commented one of his close aides. Annan described that mission clearly: he had a "sacred duty" to promote peace. Administrating the secretariat clearly was now the last of his concerns. That no member state had ever anointed him with a duty that could be deemed "sacred" was beside the point. He had come to believe the image he had spun for himself.
As long as the political environment did not change, and no new demands were to be made on the organisation, he could have sustained his performance throughout a second term. But then came 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq.
As the clouds of war loomed on the horizon, Annan felt increasingly uncomfortable. His career had been built on temporisation, conciliation and, if necessary, appeasement. Action went against his grain. This had served him well in the past but, having inflated the post of secretary-general to the dimension of a guiding light, he was now expected to take sides; his credibility demanded it. The Bush administration had chosen the road to war. The UN security council had chosen another path. Suddenly, the man whom a close assistant had described as the "ultimate fence-sitter" found the fence too narrow to sit on. As the Iraq crisis developed, Annan went on appealing for negotiations, referring to the "unique legitimacy" that only the security council could provide and asserting that war is an "issue not for one state alone." While these words were anathema to the Bush administration, they were still not explicit enough to satisfy the opponents of the war. The man who had built a career pleasing everybody ended up satisfying nobody.
In March 2003, after it became clear that security council endorsement for an attack on Iraq could not be obtained, the US went it alone. For the UN, it was an all-time low. In the days following the invasion, Annan dropped from public view. In New York it was an open secret that he had lost his voice, and diplomatic sources confirmed that the illness had been diagnosed as psychosomatic. The man's nerves had cracked. When he reappeared in public, a few weeks later, tranquilisers had helped him regain his voice and his composure but his hands betrayed him; they were in a state of constant agitation.
On 22nd May 2003, the security council adopted resolution 1483, which provided for the return of the UN to Baghdad with the task of providing humanitarian assistance and support to the coalition. The resolution was a unique opportunity for the organisation to reaffirm its relevance in what was potentially its most significant and complex operation since the end of the cold war.
Rather than choosing an individual to run the operation, Annan entrusted it to a committee of some 20 members based in New York, who would act on his behalf. Three months later, disaster struck. On 19th August, a car bomb blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad, wounding about 150 staff members, of whom 22 died, and forcing the organisation out of Iraq. In October, former Finnish president Matti Ahtisaari released a report on the incident. It was a damning indictment not only of the running of the Iraq operation but also of the way Annan managed his shop: "dysfunctional."
The report sent Annan reeling, and even more so as it came from a friend of the UN. In response he commissioned an assessment of responsibilities, a task for which he hired a friend of his, Gerald Walzer, a retired UN staff member who had spent his whole career in finance and had no security background. On 30th March 2004, the conclusions of the Walzer report were made public. Blame was apportioned in various degrees to all the UN staff involved in the Iraq operation with one exception: Annan. He alone was proclaimed innocent on all counts.
The Walzer report marked the end of the special relationship between Annan and the UN rank and file. Rather then being one of them, he was now seen as a cynical manipulator who negligently sent his staff to their deaths and then did not even have the moral fibre to assume responsibility. Overnight, he became the most hated man in the UN system.
But worse was to come. What the Walzer report did for Annan's image within the UN, the oil for food scandal did for his standing in the wider world. The oil for food programme had been the pet project of the UN secretariat, under the direct responsibility of Annan, who had personally chosen the man who ran it. For years there was a suspicion within the UN system that there were leaks within the programme, but nothing substantive had been done about it. Member states never appeared particularly keen to have the programme investigated and the temptation to do nothing was difficult to resist. After the fall of Baghdad, the opening of the Iraqi oil ministry's archives in Baghdad revealed the magnitude of the billion-dollar scam. Rather than vigorously dealing with the problem at its inception, Annan procrastinated and it was only a year after it became public that he appointed a commission, under Paul Volcker, to investigate.
Annan's problems were compounded by the wheeling and dealing of his son Kojo. Kofi had been given diplomatic status in Ghana, which exempted him from duties and income tax, and had contributed a quarter of the cost towards the purchase of a luxury Mercedes for Kojo. An outcry followed when the British press discovered that the car had been imported duty-free in Kofi's name, forcing young Kojo to reimburse some US$6,000 to Ghanaian customs. When a request was made to see the car, Kojo replied that it had been moved to Nigeria, where it had been destroyed in a fire. Annan claimed to be unaware of the matter and the question of who signed the purchase documents of the car was left unanswered. While the peccadillo might have been overlooked in others, it did nothing for a self-proclaimed "spokesman for the poor" who came from a country where half of the population survives on less than a dollar a day. And it assumed even larger proportions as it echoed the conclusions of the Volcker report, which identified Annan as a man who had been at best negligent in the discharging of his duties.
The man who was the image of calm started to lose his composure. He would stumble reading his notes, have flashes of absence or bark back at the press that had awoken from its years of idolising stupor and was now asking pointed questions. In December 2004, his former mentor Richard Holbrooke summoned Annan to his New York flat. There he, and a handful of aides, read him the riot act. If, Annan was told, he did not pick himself up, he stood a good chance of not finishing his term.
5th January 2005 was the night of the long knives. Annan brought in a new chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, who proceeded unceremoniously to give the boot to the trusted aides who had served Annan for years. A Marlborough and Cambridge-educated Englishman, Malloch Brown came from the world of PR and was close to Annan, godfather to one of his children. After a successful career at political communications firm Sawyer-Miller and later at the World Bank, in 1999 Annan named him administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Although detested by UN staff, he was credited with bringing new visibility to the ailing UN agency.
As Annan's chief of staff, and then deputy, Malloch Brown brought to his position a decisive instinct that was wanting throughout the organisation. He forced the resignation of Ruud Lubbers, high commissioner for refugees, who stood accused of sexually harassing one of his staff.
As Annan staggers into his final year, Malloch Brown, who is now considered secretary-general in all but name, has brought a semblance of calm to the saga of a man who slowly drifted back into amiable irrelevance. With Malloch Brown keeping his hand on the bureaucracy, Annan is now back at doing what he does best: socialising. Visiting Japan and meeting the emperor, presenting an award to the king of Thailand or showing up at the G8 summit were part of a routine back on track. But something subtle had changed.
While governments felt it expedient to let Annan announce that agreement on Lebanon had been reached in New York, he played no part in its negotiation. Likewise, during a subsequent public tour of the middle east, all Annan was required to do was to make the right noises. However, once the issue of peacekeeping in Lebanon became one of substance, an Italian general, Giovanni Ridino, was dispatched to New York to take over the operation, ensuring decisions affecting the field would no longer have to wait for a timorous bureaucracy to awake from its self-induced slumber.
And so Annan drifts towards the end of his term, leaving behind an organisation that, in the words of one senior staff member, has never been worse off, both politically and administratively.
Ban Ki-Moon's task will be made all the more arduous by Annan's pernicious legacy of having inflated the dimension of the post into the illusion of a papacy. The job of UN secretary-general is a management position and not an honour, and Ban will have to walk a fine line between doing nothing and doing what can realistically be done. He will, at times, be given a task but not the means to implement it and yet be held responsible if and when it fails. We can only hope that, once elected, he retains a grain of common sense and a modicum of moral sense.
