Annan: Ghana's global diplomat


Kofi Annan worked for the U.N. for 30 years when he was elected Secretary General in 1996.

(CNN) -- After joining the United Nations as a budget officer in 1962, Kofi Annan quietly worked his way up the ranks until in 1996 he was appointed secretary general -- the highest position in the United Nations. In 2001, Annan and the organization that he has dedicated his life to were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

During his four years as U.N. secretary general, the low-key, 63-year-old Ghanian diplomat has taken steps to streamline the organization and keep it focused. As the face and voice of the United Nations, he has also sought to humanize the vast organization of 189 member countries.

"We now know more than ever that sustainable economic development is not merely a matter of projects and statistics," he said in 1997. "It is, above all, a matter of people -- real people with basic needs: food, clothing, shelter and medical care."

In July, he was elected to a second, four-year term as secretary general.

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Annan's diplomatic and management skills are based "on his extraordinary personal qualities," said Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a long-time friend of Annan.

"He has the wonderful quality of strength and quiet dignity," Holbrooke said. "It allows him to have a greater persuasive power than he otherwise would have. He's gentle and he's unassuming and, yet, he has great stature."

Kofi Atta Annan was born into an upper-class merchant family in Kumasi, Ghana, on April 8, 1938, when Ghana was part of the British Gold Coast colony. It became an independent country in 1957.

Annan's father was the governor of Ashanti Province and a hereditary paramount chief of the Fante group, a tribal family from the southern coast of Ghana.


Annan, a member of Macalester College Cosmopolitan Club in 1960, explains his native Ghana dress to other students.

Annan began his higher education at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. In 1959, he transferred to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he became a state champion orator, a member of the track team and the president of the Cosmopolitan Club, which promoted friendship between U.S. and international students.

At age 23, Annan graduated with a degree in economics. The following year, he pursued a master's degree at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationals in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1962, he took the position of budget officer at the World Health Organization (WHO), a branch of the United Nations.

For almost 10 years, Annan worked in U.N. offices in Geneva, New York and Ethiopia. In 1972, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a master's degree in management.


Annan played a coordinating role in the turnover of troops between the U.N. and Nato in Bosnia during 1993.

He returned to Ghana in 1974 and worked for two years as managing director of the Ghana Tourist Development Co. In 1976, he returned to the United Nations in the High Commissioner for Refugees office, where he would stay for seven years.

Reassigned to the U.N. headquarters in New York in the mid-1980s, Annan advanced in a number of positions until finally reaching the organization's high-profile peacekeeping operations in 1990.

By March 1993, he was under secretary general of peacekeeping, overseeing a $3.5 million budget and 17 military operations.

Soon after his appointment, Annan expressed regret and dissatisfaction that the international community did so little to stop the killing in Somalia and the genocide in Rwanda in the winter and spring of 1993 and 1994, respectively.

He was frustrated with governments that were unwilling to give military and financial support to the Security Council's peacekeeping resolutions. At a press conference in March 1994 he said, "Peacekeeping is always cheaper than war."

He began to garner public attention in the early 1990s after negotiating the release of Western hostages in Iraq and the safe transport of a half-million Asian workers who had become stranded in that area.

As the representative of the U.N. secretary general in Bosnia, Annan mediated among the four contentious outside powers who had intervened in Bosnia -- the United States, Britain, France and Russia.

"His style is very understated," said Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, who met Annan in the early 1990s when she served as ambassador to the United Nations. "He is a very gentle man and somebody who speaks in a very low voice. But he also shows a great deal of determination."

By the fall of 1996, this determination caught the attention of the Security Council, which was looking for someone to replace U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian.

Annan won the majority of support and was appointed secretary general on December 17, 1996, becoming the first black secretary general from Africa.

"I think it can truly be said that Kofi Annan helped save the U.N. from its low point," said Holbrooke. "That low point came when the peacekeeping efforts in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia all came to grief in the early 1990s."


Annan with the man he succeeded, Boutros Boutros Ghali in 1996.

During his first term as secretary general, he reorganized the United Nations' 50,000 workers and 30 agencies worldwide, pushed for the United States to clear its debts with the United Nations and urged patience and resolution among global conflicts.

The United States criticized Annan for a failed peace mission to Iraq in 1998 and the United Nations continued to be reproached for failing to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s.

"The Bosnia crisis was one of the hugely complex issues for the United Nations to handle," said Albright. "There were a lot of disagreements about it."

Annan has been married to his second wife, Nane Lagergren, a Swedish lawyer and judge, since 1984. She is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who is credited with saving the lives of many Jews in World War II.

Annan has two children, Ama and Kojo from his first marriage to a Nigerian woman that ended in divorce. Lagergren also has a daughter, Nina, from her previous marriage. Annan and Lagergren live in Manhattan.

Holbrooke, who has known Annan for nearly 20 years, said the couple have a very close marriage.


Pataki, Annan and Giuliani at 'ground zero' in New York shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center.

"I remember going to dinner dances with them where almost everyone else leaves after the desert. And the dance floor is empty and there are Kofi and Nane out there on the floor dancing cheek to cheek," he said.

Lagergren once told Holdbrooke that she has never heard her husband raise his voice. "And yet, he's persuasive," said Holbrooke.

Following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, Annan deemed the United Nations the center of a "global coalition against terrorism."

He urged the general assembly to devise a comprehensive plan against terrorism.

"I understand and accept the need for legal precision," he said. "But let me say frankly that there is also a need for moral clarity. There can be no acceptance of those who would seek to justify the deliberate taking of innocent civilian life, regardless of cause or grievance."

On October 12, Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Annan said the timing could not be better for the organization, which has had to re-double efforts in the Middle East and northern Africa following the attacks.

"I think it's a great shot in the arm for us," he said.

"He embodies the principles the Peace Prize seeks. He is trying to seek peace in a very difficult environment," Holbrooke said.