Kofi Annan

The following article about United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is copied from The New American, Vol. 13, No. 03, February 3, 1997.

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"UN Lifer at the Helm" by Robert W. Lee

United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's five-year term expired at the stroke of midnight on December 31st. His successor, Kofi Atta Annan of Ghana, is the first representative of a black African country to hold the UN's top administrative post. After Annan was selected by the Security Council on December 13th, and confirmed by the General Assembly four days later, he was allowed to take his oath of office without delay. The UN Charter provides for one Secretary-General at a time, but there appears to have been two during the final two weeks of 1996.

Annan, who is the seventh permanent Secretary-General since the UN Charter was ratified in 1945, has been a loyal component of the UN bureaucracy for more than three decades. His predecessors include Marxist U Thant of Burma (1961-71); former Nazi second lieutenant Kurt Waldheim of Austria (1972-81), who is now barred from entering the U.S. due to his links to war crimes; and socialists Trygve Lie of Norway (1946-53), Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden (1953-61), Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru (1982-91) and Boutros-Ghali of Egypt (1992-96). To that list must be added "American" Alger Hiss, who was Secretary-General of the UN founding conference in San Francisco. Hiss, who died last November, had moonlighted as a Soviet spy and spent 44 months in federal prison for lying about it.

Rotating Role

Boutros-Ghali is the first Secretary-General to be denied a second term. Annan is also likely to serve only one term, in deference to the informal UN policy of rotating the office on a regional basis. Since Boutros-Ghali and Annan are both Africans, the two-term quota for that continent will have been met.

Secretaries-General to date have all been champions of economic and political collectivism and inveterate foes of limited government and free enterprise. Kofi Annan is well-suited to carry on that tradition. During an address to the General Assembly after taking his oath on December 17th, he claimed that the world is beginning to recognize "the economic base of stability," and asserted that it is crucial to "ensure that the voice of the United Nations in economic matters is heard by those members states with the greatest capacity to give...."

The previous day, during a PBS interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault on the Newshour With Jim Lehrer, Annan reflected on elements of his "vision" for the UN, stating that "definitely peacekeeping will be one of them" and "the establishment of norms and international law will be another." He added that "we need to do a lot of work in sustainable development and the environment," and "we need to work on intolerance...."

His first order of business, however, will be to entice the U.S. Congress to pay the $1.3 billion in past dues and assessments that the UN claims is owed by the U.S. Indeed, a major reason for the William Jefferson Clinton Administration's veto of a second term for Boutros-Ghali was its belief that only by replacing Boutros- Ghali, who had antagonized many members of the Republican congressional majority, could the stalemate over the arrears be broken. As reported in the December 18th Washington Post, "Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other senior officials said that only by ditching Boutros-Ghali, who was seen by many in Congress as an obstacle to reform and as the architect of the U.S. peacekeeping debacle in Somalia, could the administration persuade Congress to come up with the money to pay the full U.S. dues and assessments."

Asked by Ms. Hunter-Gault if he would be willing to personally lobby Congress over the arrears issue, Annan replied, "I think it will be necessary, and I am prepared to do so." The next day, Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Princeton Lyman, who oversees relations with the United Nations, told reporters that the Administration was working on a schedule for paying the back dues. One option being considered would, Lyman said, spread the payments over five years. Another plan would complete the payments sooner, provided that the UN agrees to a reduction in the U.S. share of the "peacekeeping" budget. Congress had decreed such a reduction (from 31 percent to 25 percent) in 1995, but the UN has continued to demand the higher amount.

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