Thinking Globally - Kofi Annan Reminds the World That the United Nations Has a Bully Pulpit, Too

www.washingtonpost.com By Lynne Duke Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 30, 2003; Page C01 UNITED NATIONS

"Our agenda is one of disarmament. And the U.N. is not in the business of overthrowing governments," says the secretary general and Nobel Peace medalist.

Kofi Annan virtually marches through the corridors, hands behind back, gray overcoat flapping, eyes cast down. Fred Eckhard, his chief spokesman, walks beside him, recounting the day's news. Burly security men shadow Annan, one of the world's most high-profile and respected diplomats, a man who's managed to bring new life to this once moribund and maligned organization.

Annan barely slows as he approaches a glass door. His protectors whip it open just in time. The same choreography of protocol unfolds upstairs in his sunny 38th-floor office. In a deft move as Annan enters the room, Victor, the scratchy-voiced valet, elegantly scoops the overcoat off Annan's shoulders.

It is a Wednesday, the day to meet with the cabinet. An effort to streamline U.N. policy, the cabinet is an Annan creation, one of his reforms. As he enters his conference room, members of the 33-person body are poring over a list of priorities for the year. It is a long list (three pages), an exhaustive one. Of course, Iraq is on that list. But so are scores of other issues and hot spots around the world.

Removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may be at the top of Washington's agenda, but the United Nations' agenda is top-heavy with all kinds of grave and threatening situations. There is North Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Middle East, Ivory Coast, Cyprus, Congo, Zimbabwe, the HIV pandemic, looming famine in Africa, and terrorism cropping up everywhere, all over the globe, all over Annan's turf.

"President of the world," Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, once called Annan. It was just a joke, but 64-year-old Annan didn't like it. He knows well the limits of his office, and the dangers of presumption. He's got no power, anyway -- not like a head of state.

Known for the subtle push, the deft move, the calculated but gentle blow, Annan must rely on his strongest weapons, the U.N.'s moral suasion and its legitimacy. He can only nudge nations, cajole them, reason with them or shame them. He can only try, perhaps in vain, to slow down a drive toward war. But try he must. That's his job. No wonder some in Washington wish he'd just butt out.

Even before President Bush threw down the gauntlet on Iraq in his September speech to the United Nations and threatened unilateral action, there was Annan, striking one for the United Nations. Annan had his staff release his own speech in advance of Bush's. It warned that only the United Nations could provide legitimacy to the U.S. approach on Iraq, and it suggested that unilateral action was unacceptable. It was Annan's attempt to "put down the marker for multilateralism," says Edward Mortimer, Annan's chief speechwriter.

Then, in November, when Saddam Hussein accepted the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, Annan released the acceptance letter to the media even before it had been reviewed by the U.N. Security Council. And he immediately urged the council to accept Hussein's assurances.

Through the fall and into winter, since U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq resumed, the Bush administration and the United Nations have had a strange way of contradicting each other, with sharp rhetoric from an angry Bush, followed by Annan's mellifluous pleadings.

On one day Bush is "sick and tired of [Iraqi] games and deception," while Annan is "convinced that peace is possible."

On Monday, the U.N. weapons inspectors, who report directly to the Security Council, presented a mixed interim report. One group of inspectors asked for more time, while the other accused Iraq of not genuinely accepting U.N. resolutions demanding Iraqi disarmament.

The Bush administration continued its tough talk, with even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the man considered an advocate for diplomacy in the Cabinet, warning that there was not much time left for Iraqi compliance.

And then there was Annan, appealing for more time. "I'm not saying forever," he said, but the inspectors "do need time to get the work done."

Yesterday, after Bush's State of the Union speech, he said through a spokesman that he "still has not given up hope for a peaceful solution."

Annan's various public statements on Iraq have mystified some Bush administration officials. While Annan has close relations with Powell, with whom he speaks several times a week, his relations with other members of the administration are simply cordial, sources say.

"I believe the Bush administration is divided on Kofi Annan," says Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Some people think he's an obstacle to the consensus they're trying to build, and others understand that he's doing his job and he's the best secretary general we've ever had, but he doesn't work for the United States."

The tension, in a way, is natural. Annan must represent the will of the majority within the 191-member General Assembly, which means the developing countries that make up the bulk of the U.N.'s membership. But he must also tend to the interests of the United States and its powerful allies of the wealthier world, as represented on the 15-member Security Council.

"We do understand he has to balance our interests and those of other members of the international community," says a State Department official. "He knows the U.S. is an important player. The U.N. needs the United States. We pay the largest share of dues to the U.N. And he knows that our opinion counts, and he has to be careful not to say something that could complicate issues."

The Iraq crisis has made Annan's balancing act more tricky. He is faced with a seemingly decisive global superpower preparing for war, versus an always-cautious United Nations, where armed intervention is a last resort.

In any situation of potential conflict, Annan says during an interview in his office, "you have to exhaust all possibilities of political and diplomatic settlement. Of course I do not rule out that there may come a time when use of force may be necessary. But you have to really make a genuine effort to resolve it without placing innocent people at risk."

It sounds almost like an apologia as Annan describes this strain.

"The U.S. has tremendous power in the world today and quite a lot of influence. And there are lots of things that it can do and does do. And there are many instances when it believes that it can take action and would want to take action. And the U.N.'s approach is very deliberative. They [U.S. officials] may even find it ponderous. . . .

"Obviously it's much easier if one country was to decide alone. But we live in an interdependent world, in a world where what happens in one country has an impact on others. . . . With that enormous power and capacity to act, the slow deliberative nature of the U.N. can be sometimes frustrating for Washington, and I understand that.

"Our agendas are not always different, but it is different on this particular issue," Annan says of the United States and the Iraq crisis. "There are shades of difference on this particular issue, and emphasis.

"The U.N's agenda is one of disarmament."

He pauses, clearly crafting his words, which he delivers like a gentle blow, his voice soft and even.

"Our agenda is one of disarmament. And the U.N. is not in the business of overthrowing governments."

Could there possibly be two global figures whose styles are so different?

Hugo Chavez, the embattled president of Venezuela, burst into Annan's conference room for a meeting, virtually shouting greetings to the assembled press, attempting to shake any hand he can clutch. Though Annan had walked in with him, the secretary general stepped aside and left the voluble South American leader in the limelight to joke and joust with his audience.

And as Chavez prepared to depart and walked down the hall with his arm draped chummily about Annan's neck, the secretary general looked like a man caught in someone else's show.

Annan doesn't do bluster. He's not given to grandstanding. He isn't even a man to raise his voice -- not even to counter those infamous tirades when former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright used to yell at him. And that old story that he once hung up on her?

"I don't go around hanging up on people," he says, amused. "That is not my style."

To observe Annan at work is to see the epitome of the U.N. system, of its brand of global diplomacy. The Ghanaian-born diplomat and career bureaucrat rose through the ranks of the protocol-driven labyrinth along the East River and was shaped by it for 30 years. He learned its glacial pace, its institutional history and ceremony.

He also learned to please many constituencies at once.

He is, in a sense, Washington's man. Despite the well-known failures that occurred on Annan's watch as chief of U.N. peacekeeping -- namely, "ethnic cleansing" in Rwanda and Bosnia -- the United States pressed his candidacy for secretary general back in 1996, when the Clinton administration had come to the end of its rope with Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Annan received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 for bringing new life to the organization, and the United Nations itself also was honored for being "the only negotiable road to global peace and cooperation."

Where once U.S. officials viewed the United Nations as merely a necessary evil, now the body is afforded a grudging respect, largely because of Annan. Now serving his second five-year term, with a personal style that could best be dubbed Brooks Brothers cool, Annan the quintessential "global man" is so much a part of the culture that he's even been featured, with his wife, Nane, in the February Vogue.

So imagine Kofi Annan as a farmer, tilling the soil, perhaps rolling up those tailored sleeves, even breaking a sweat on a usually unruffled brow. It's a stretch even to think it.

But ask him what he wants to do after the United Nations, and that's what he says: Farm the land.

He did not grow up on the land. Back in Kumasi, Ghana, his father was a businessman, and Annan's youth was preoccupied with politics and anticipation of Ghana's independence from British colonialism in 1957, as the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain its freedom. His adult life has been completely removed from rural work. He is a Swiss- and U.S.-educated management specialist, with a wife who's a Swedish lawyer and artist.

But his idea of farming is part of a mission.

"I would also want to do something in Africa to devote a bit of time to perhaps working with others, to ensure that we do have a green revolution in Africa, and Africa can feed itself."

Africa faces another season of looming famine, with many nations of the east and south relying increasingly on humanitarian relief. The United Nations will have to beg its members, especially the rich ones, to finance relief operations to save African lives. Donor fatigue never makes this an easy task when it comes to Africa.

When Kofi Annan asks the United Nations for peacekeepers, he can never get enough. When he asks for humanitarian relief commitments, they fall short. When he asks for funding for medicines for HIV and AIDS, the funds only trickle in.

"It's depressing. It's difficult," he says of the U.N.'s attempts to narrow global inequalities. "But it's not hopeless." People do care and will act, he says, provided they are made to see the world as a "small global village" where we're all interconnected.

"What I think we need to do is encourage governments to think in broader terms and to have a broader view of what their national interest means, particularly in this borderless and interdependent world. Because if we moved away from the narrow, selfish definition of national interests, we would see that the issues we are dealing with are global and they're going to affect all of us, whether it's AIDS, the environment, whatever. And if we have that broader view, maybe we will reach out a bit more. How you get governments and people to develop that broader view is a challenge."

Just last week Annan discussed the HIV-AIDS crisis with Bush during a private dinner at the White House. Yesterday, he "congratulated" the president "on his pledge to provide stronger U.S. leadership in combating the devastating impact of the global AIDS epidemic."

Last weekend, while the tension over Iraq reached a new pitch, Annan flew off to Paris to attempt to mediate in yet another crisis -- this time, the civil war in Ivory Coast.

But he was back at U.N. headquarters Monday in time enough to ply his quiet diplomacy. As the U.N. weapons inspectors were about to deliver their reports to the Security Council, Annan invited them in for a meeting. Neither Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, nor Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reports to Annan, but Annan has had periodic sit-downs with them, as he does with any senior official.

Annan was not attempting to influence them, says Fred Eckhard, his spokesman, but merely to offer some delicate advice on dealing with the Security Council and its political environment.

He knows the stakes. The shades of difference between the United States and the United Nations could be the difference between war and peace in Iraq. It may come to war, and Annan knows it. But it is his job to find a different way.