Kofi Annan (1938 - 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006, the first to be chosen from the ranks of the organisation's own staff. [1] He and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, and after leaving office he continued mediating international disputes until his death. [2]
Early life and education
Annan was born on 8 April 1938 in Kumasi, in what was then the British colony of the Gold Coast, into a family of Fante and Asante aristocratic background; his father was a provincial governor and worked for a trading company. [1] He was educated at Mfantsipim School, a Methodist boarding school, and came of age as Ghana moved to independence in 1957.
He studied economics at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology before completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in Minnesota. He undertook graduate work at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and later earned a master's degree in management at the MIT Sloan School of Management as a Sloan Fellow. [3]
Career in the United Nations
Annan joined the UN system in 1962 as a budget officer with the World Health Organization in Geneva, and spent almost his entire working life in the organisation. [1] He held posts in Addis Ababa, Cairo and New York, covering personnel, budget and refugee affairs, and rose to head the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in the early 1990s.
That role placed him in charge during the failures of UN missions in Rwanda and Bosnia, where peacekeepers did not prevent the 1994 genocide or the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica. Annan later acknowledged the organisation's shortcomings and commissioned independent inquiries into both, treating them as the basis for reform rather than as closed matters. [3]
Secretary-General
Annan became Secretary-General on 1 January 1997 and was reappointed for a second term. He pushed administrative reform of the Secretariat, made HIV/AIDS a central UN concern and helped create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and oversaw the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. [1]
He launched the UN Global Compact to engage business with human rights and environmental standards. In 2001 he and the United Nations received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work for a better organised and more peaceful world. [2] He publicly opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, later saying it was not in conformity with the UN Charter, and his final years in office were also marked by scrutiny of the Oil-for-Food Programme, which an independent inquiry led by Paul Volcker examined in detail. [4]
Later work and legacy
After stepping down at the end of 2006 he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation and joined The Elders, the group of senior public figures convened by Nelson Mandela, later chairing it. [3] He mediated an end to the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008 and served as joint UN-Arab League envoy to Syria in 2012, resigning when the mission could not secure a political settlement.
He died in Bern, Switzerland, on 18 August 2018 and was given a state funeral in Ghana. His honours included the Order of the Star of Ghana, the Sakharov Prize, the Olof Palme Prize and honorary doctorates from universities worldwide. [1]
