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UN's Annan: Teflon past turns into rocky future
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-06-01 21:04

UNITED NATIONS - Dignified, soft-spoken, honored as a Nobel peace prize laureate, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has embraced the job as the world's top diplomat with openness and a widely acclaimed moral authority.

But since the 2003 war in Iraq, which he opposed, and the disastrous bombing of U.N. staff in Baghdad a few months later, the tragedies and scandals have run non-stop: fraud in the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, sexual abuse by peacekeepers and U.S. conservatives' calls for him to step down.

Now some of his admirers -- and he still has many around the world -- wonder if the very qualities that once earned him the label of diplomatic rock star worked against him, namely his warmth and a reluctance to engage in confrontations.

"There was a cult of personality, in a very pleasant way," said Edward Luck, a Columbia University professor and expert on the United Nations. "He is a decent person and his style never seemed to cause a problem. Now he can't do anything right. Every judgment is questioned. Every decision is doubted."

Annan has insisted he will finish out his second five-year term, which expires in December 2006. But how wounded he will be and whether he can enact an ambitious program to overhaul the world body remains to be seen.

U.S. officials, for example, speak of U.N. reform mainly in terms of management supervision rather than other major changes, such as a boost in foreign aid, that Annan wants.

Sylvana Foa, spokeswoman for Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, says U.N. staff were lulled into believing Annan's popularity would protect the world body.

"He had seven years of Teflon tenure. Nothing stuck to him," she said. "Now they at the U.N. are overly traumatized. They forgot what real life was like. Boutros didn't have a honeymoon for even one day."

Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram, says that if Annan were clean -- and most observers rule out financial corruption on his part -- "he should have taken the offensive and put his case before the 191 U.N. members, who would have endorsed him."

Annan still travels constantly, sees a stream of visitors each day and pushes his sweeping program to overhaul the United Nations, especially in combating poverty. But he is more subdued, his hands sometimes unsteady under the pressure.

Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's new chief of staff, says every revelation "knocks us off the more forward-looking U.N. agenda" because "oil-for-food keeps on tumbling out of the closet to confront us as many times as we hope we've closed the door on it. It's taking a real toll."

Annan occasionally drops his customary good humor, saying recently that the United Nations was "outgunned and outmanned" by its critics. He said Saddam Hussein was tacitly allowed by the Security Council to sell oil to Jordan outside of the U.N. program "on the American and British watch."

CANDIDATE OF U.S.

Annan, a Ghanaian, was the first secretary-general elected to office from inside U.N. bureaucracy, the candidate of the Clinton administration, which vetoed a second term for Boutros-Ghali. He assumed office in January 1997, having worked at the United Nations since 1962, and easily won re-election for a second five-year term, which ends in December 2006.

Among his early acts was an open acknowledgment of failures as head of peacekeeping during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the massacre in Bosnia's enclave of Srebrenica a year later.

Even Canadian Romeo Dallaire, the U.N. general whose cries for help in Rwanda went unheeded, blamed the disaster on the big powers and calls Annan the only world leader who "comes close to statesmanship."

But then the oil-for-food scandal broke after new Iraqi leaders disclosed lists of government leaders, political groups and individuals given illicit oil vouchers, including the U.N. head of the $67 billion program. Added to that were U.N. probes into sexual abuse by peacekeepers, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Annan himself is blamed for lax management and for not investigating the role of his son, Kojo, who worked for a firm that received a lucrative contract in Iraq.

The Bush White House has not withdrawn its support from Annan, despite calls in Congress for his resignation, but at least one U.S. official has telephoned reporters to say their stories were not tough enough on Annan.

Whether wrongdoing is pervasive at the United Nations or isolated, the world body, and Annan himself, has been weakened because lofty expectations have not been met, analysts say.

"There is the assumption that the United Nations upholds higher moral standards than national governments and their employees should be above suspicion," Columbia's Luck said. "A lot of people put the U.N. on a pedestal. That some might be corrupt or abusive is hard for them to swallow."

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