This book provides a good narrative history of most of the major international crises since Kofi Annan came to prominence in the United Nations, first as Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping in 1993, and then as Secretary General from 1997. It covers Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, Iraq, Darfur, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the oil-for-food affair.
Kofi Annan originally came to the Secretary Generalship as a U.S. backed candidate, but was later to conflict with the U.S. over Iraq. Coming from a semi aristocratic and politically moderate background in Ghana, he had spent his working life with United Nations bodies, starting with the World Health Organization in 1962. Self protective, silent and modest, he was a contrast to his brilliant but status conscious predecessor, Boutros Boutros Ghali. Kofi Annan is described by Traub as having the political reactions of a “high minded and progressive” European, and of having “a horror of violence that made him prone to find interlocutors where there were none”. This characteristic is blamed for his supposed mishandling of Saddam Hussein in the run in to the Iraq war.
Annan revised U.N. doctrines to justify armed intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states to prevent crimes against humanity. Although there was no U.N. Resolution to approve the 1998 NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo, Annan was seen to have justified it later in a speech to the General Assembly where he said there was a right to intervene in such cases but that it must be “fairly and consistently applied”. He later had the concept of a “right to protect” accepted as part of the U.N. reforms of 2005.
Annan’s term was dogged by investigations into past U.N. failings. Genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the corruption in the U.N. Oil for Food programme in Iraq were the subject of rigorous public enquiries and Annan found himself defending the indefensible. The problem was that these inquiries had full access to the U.N.’s own papers, but not to the decision-making records of member states, particularly those on the Security Council. This structural bias did no favours to the United Nations.
Mandates of U.N. peacekeeping operations are set by the Security Council, not by the Secretary-General. Peacekeepers need clear, credible and achievable mandates, but do not always get them. Units within U.N. forces often took their instructions from their home capitals, rather than from the U.N. Commander on the spot. At one point, only 32 officials in New York were supervising 27,365 peacekeepers in different parts of the world. That combination of large mandates and insufficient staffing creates conditions in which after-the-event blame fests are inevitable.
The great tragedy of Annan’s tenure occurred on 19 August 2003 when 22 United Nations personnel, including the immensely talented Sergio Vieira de Mello, were blown up by suicide bombers in Baghdad. Many U.N. staff blamed Annan for having sent them there in the first place and believed he had done so to please the United States, although he himself had described their invasion of Iraq as ‘illegal”.
This is a worthwhile book. The author had continuing access to Annan over four years and observed him in moments of both triumph and despair. The book deals with so many parallel crises that it is at times hard to follow, and would have been benefited from a chronology of events at the end of the text.
Kofi Annan will be seen by history as the Secretary-General who attempted the most comprehensive reform of the United Nations since its foundation, and who set up a Peacebuilding Commission and a Human Rights Council, streamlined management and won agreement to the principle of humanitarian intervention.
He could have achieved more if energy had not been exhausted in ultimately futile arguments about who should be on the Security Council, where the World War Two victors hung onto their archaic privileges.
In international organisations fundamental changes can only take place by unanimous agreement, and that requires exceptional levels of farsightedness and generosity, characteristics which were missing at the end of the day.
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