U.N. Chief's Record Comes Under Fire
Oil-for-Food Scandal and Others Raise Questions About Annan's Leadership
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 24, 2005; A14
UNITED NATIONS -- In eight years as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan has come as close to superstardom as a diplomat can get -- lauded on the cover of Time, sharing the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the organization he leads and becoming known as the secular pope for his advocacy for peace and the poor.
But now an internal inquiry and no fewer than six congressional panels are examining evidence of influence-peddling in the Iraq oil-for-food program. A series of financial and sexual misconduct scandals have implicated some of Annan's closest advisers. Conservative Republicans have called for Annan's resignation and threatened to withhold U.S. funding. And the United States has disputed his claim that a report by the U.N. oil-for-food inquiry had exonerated him.
The honeymoon has ended rather brutally, said Shashi Tharoor, a senior U.N. official who has served with Annan for more than a decade. Tharoor and other Annan supporters say the secretary general's legacy will ultimately eclipse the current controversy. But others -- not only in Congress, but also in the United Nations -- say the record raises fundamental questions about his judgment and integrity.
At the moment, Annan's situation is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy: The same qualities that powered his rise -- a passion for compromise, a desire to please the most powerful U.N. states and an intense loyalty to an inner circle of bureaucrats -- can also be seen as contributing to his decline. Some members of his inner circle have abused their authority, and his efforts to patch up relations with the United States have undermined his standing with other U.N. members.
He has sought to regain his balance in recent weeks, prodding the Security Council to act more decisively on war crimes in Sudan and launching initiatives to restructure or restore accountability to a number of U.N. agencies. But even his power to change the institution has come into question.
My feeling is that Kofi has shrunk in stature somewhat in the last year, said Stephen C. Schlesinger, director of the New School's World Policy Institute and a former U.N. adviser, who still considers him the world's moral authority. Even as Annan's new chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, has taken steps to restore confidence in the United Nations, Schlesinger said, some of these steps have given the impression that Kofi is kind of losing control.
In a brief interview, Annan, 67, was both contrite and combative.
I admit that I have made mistakes, he said. Maybe, in retrospect, some of the people who were put in certain positions were not ideally suited. But he insisted that Benon Sevan, the man he appointed to lead the oil-for-food program, and who has since been accused of compromising its integrity, was considered suitable for the job and had the Security Council's confidence.
Annan said he firmly believes he can lead the United Nations through the final two years of his second term. And referring to Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who was the first to call for Annan's resignation, he said: With all due respect, he wasn't one of those who elected or appointed me, and I will never have the nerve to ask any U.S. senator to resign.
Annan, the descendant of Ghanaian tribal chiefs, has worked at the United Nations since 1962, climbing to the top of its departments of management, finance and peacekeeping.
From March 1993 to December 1996, he presided over an unprecedented expansion of the U.N. peacekeeping mission. He oversaw two of the world body's most tragic episodes -- the failures to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys-- but he also impressed U.S. officials by supporting the use of force to halt atrocities by Bosnian Serbs.
In summer 1995, Annan broke ranks with then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, delegating U.N. authority to a NATO general to carry out airstrikes against Bosnian Serbs. The next year, the Clinton administration rewarded Annan by leading an unpopular battle to block Boutros-Ghali's reelection to a second term.
Kofi was perfect, Madeleine K. Albright, who was serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations then, said in an interview. He was completely attuned to the needs of the United Nations and willing to push for reforms.
In January 1997, Annan became the U.N.'s seventh secretary general. He helped avert war in Iraq in 1998, managed East Timor's transition to independence in 2002, persuaded then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to restore U.S. funding to the United Nations and boosted staff morale to a point not seen since the tenure of Dag Hammarskjold. He also cut a thousand U.N. jobs, raised the profile of the Geneva-based human rights office, strengthened relief operations and created a cabinet-style management team that weakened traditional U.N. fiefdoms.
In 2001, Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel Committee, declared, No one has done more than Kofi Annan to revitalize the U.N.
But given the United Nations' current crises -- not only the widening oil-for-food scandal, which last week prompted Annan's envoy to North Korea to step aside while investigators examine his ties to a South Korean lobbyist, but also reports of rampant sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers and of favoritism at the U.N. elections division -- Malloch Brown conceded that Annan's reforms didn't go far enough, leaving him open to attack.
Annan's opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 angered conservative Republicans -- and his efforts to accommodate the United States after the war alienated many U.N. staff members.
When he sent his top political troubleshooter, Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil, to Iraq to support the U.S.-backed political transition, many U.N. staffers felt that Annan allowed the United Nations to legitimize the U.S. occupation.
Then came the Aug. 19, 2003, attack on the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters, which killed Vieira de Mello and 21 others.
Closest Advisers Kept Jobs
Annan sacked his top security adviser and disciplined several other U.N. officials -- but many mid-level officers felt that he bore primary responsibility for sending U.N. staff into harm's way, and noted that he spared some of his closest advisers, including his chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, and his deputy, Louise Frechette.
Annan, meanwhile, struggled to mend the United Nations' political divisions, announcing plans to set up a panel to produce changes that would balance Washington's demand for a United Nations more capable of enforcing its resolutions against other members' desire for clearer rules on the use of force.
Some observers say Annan set himself up by placing himself in the middle of a bitter political struggle. He put a big sign on his forehead that said 'I'm vulnerable,'  said Edward Luck, a Columbia University professor who studies the United Nations.
All the while, allegations of corruption in the oil-for-food program were circulating. And after the United States began to occupy Iraq, evidence surfaced that put the focus on U.N. officials.
The program was established in December 1996 to allow Iraq to sell its oil to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. It ended after the U.S. invasion in March 2003. It eased the civilian suffering attributable to economic sanctions imposed on Baghdad -- and allowed Saddam Hussein's government to collect $2 billion in kickbacks from companies doing business with Iraq.
The U.N. investigation, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, has established that Sevan, the administrator Annan handpicked for the program, steered millions of dollars in lucrative oil business to an Egyptian business associate. It has faulted Riza, Annan's former chief of staff, for shredding three years' worth of backup documents. And while it found insufficient evidence that Annan directed business to his son's employer, it also said that his son, Kojo Annan, 31, may have earned as much as $485,000 in consulting fees from the company while it did millions in business in Iraq for the United Nations -- and it portrayed the secretary general as an excessively permissive father who failed to adequately probe allegations that his son's dealings posed a conflict of interest.
Annan last fall delivered a wrenching public denouncement of his son for lying to him about his relationship with his employer. He also said he felt that Volcker's report had delivered an exoneration of him.
We did not exonerate Kofi Annan, Mark Pieth, a senior member of Volcker's team, told reporters. We should not brush this off. A certain mea culpa would have been appropriate. On Thursday, a State Department official also disputed Annan's use of the word exoneration, marking the first time the U.S. government has done so.
It was also last fall that Coleman, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations, called for Annan's resignation. As other congressional Republicans joined him, the Bush administration kept silent for several days before joining the other U.N. members in saying he should not leave.
'I Had a Clear Conscience'
Annan recalled that period as a tough patch but said, I had a clear conscience, and I knew we would come through that.
But Coleman remains unsatisfied. We're going to continue to push the issue until we have a better sense ultimately of how it happened and who benefited and where the money went, he said in an interview. He also reiterated his call for Annan to step down.
Albright warned that an Annan resignation would hurt the United States. It would set reform back years, she said. It would be very evident that the United States had forced him. If people think we have problems now, they would be infinitely larger than that.
Many U.N. officials and diplomats believe the Republicans' attacks are politically motivated, rooted in Annan's opposition to the Iraq war. And Annan said the United Nations was outgunned and outmanned by critics who have used the oil-for-food scandal to tar the organization. In addition, he said, the bulk of the money that Saddam made came out of smuggling outside the oil-for-food [program], and it was on the American and British watch.
In January, Annan brought in Malloch Brown to clean house, and Malloch Brown has forced out several of Annan's most loyal political advisers. He has also reversed decisions by Annan to pay Sevan's legal fees and to clear Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, of wrongdoing after a U.N. investigation accused him of sexual harassment.
He has also highlighted the United Nations' support for the Bush administration's focus on weapons proliferation and terrorism as the prime threats of the day.
But now, U.N. officials and delegates from developing countries feel that Annan is trying to accommodate the United States to save himself.
It's bad enough to be a lame-duck secretary general and be one under fire, said Columbia's Luck. But in addition to that, [to] have your legs pulled out from under you by having some of your closest confidants removed, I think it just underlines how much he is a lame duck.
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