Quotes of the Day
The sonorous voice is familiar around the world. No matter what the crisis of the day, Kofi Annan's soft baritone always manages to convey a sense of imperturbable gravitas. Yet his calm must have been sorely tested last week when the U.N. Secretary-General learned more about the latest trouble lapping at his door. Annan had gathered a few top aides at a private site to discuss the scandal over the U.N.'s management of the oil-for-food program during the reign of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. In the middle of the discussion, a staff member's cell phone rang with unsettling news: another story was about to break, this one about suspicious payments to Annan's son Kojo from the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection S.A., which won an oil-for-food contract in 1998. Annan, a man famously immune to anger, allowed "a look of surprise and dismay to cross his face," says someone who was there, "and his jaw started clenching and unclenching. Then he said very quietly, 'Let's get on with the agenda.'" On Nov. 29, speaking to reporters a few days after the revelations about his son started pouring out, he addressed the mess with his characteristic cool: "Naturally, I was very disappointed and surprised. I understand the perception problem for the U.N., the perception of conflict of interest and wrongdoing."
That "perception problem" has given further ammunition to Annan's U.S. critics, mainly Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators, who have made him the latest target in their long-running feud with the U.N. For years — decades, in fact — these conservatives have alternately denounced or dismissed the international body for its inefficiency and bias. Their view of the U.N. sank to new lows after the Security Council refused to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But nothing has done more to tarnish U.N. credibility than the metastasizing oil-for-food scandal, which has grown from a fringe obsession among conservative ideologues to the subject of five separate congressional investigations. All this has trained the hot lights on Annan, a second-term Secretary- General and Nobel Peace laureate who finds himself fighting to defend his office in the face of a small but determined band of congressional foes. After holding a single public hearing, Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican chairing one of the congressional inquiries, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week that "Kofi Annan should resign, because the most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch." Administration officials distanced themselves from Coleman's remarks, but the White House hardly offered him a vote of confidence. When asked whether Annan should take the fall for the scandal, President Bush said only, "I look forward to a good, honest appraisal of what went on."
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Even if it wanted to, the Bush Administration has little power to push Annan out before his second term ends in 2006. (The only startling resignation at the U.N. last week was that of U.S. Ambassador John Danforth,who said he was quitting primarily to spend more time with his ailing wife.) So far, there is no evidence that Annan's son did anything improper or illegal, much less the Secretary-General himself. Annan's supporters point to his record of integrity and honesty, which few have ever questioned. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former British Ambassador to the U.N., spoke for many outside Washington's conservative circles when he said, "Of course Annan should not resign. It would be hard to find anyone as good."
But the oil-for-food imbroglio is just part of a growing battle of wills between Washington and the Secretary-General it handpicked in 1996. While the Bush Administration is unlikely to call openly for his ouster, it doesn't mind seeing him squirm. Some members haven't forgotten Annan's unwillingness to endorse U.S. foreign policy goals, such as defeating the insurgency in Iraq or rallying the Security Council to penalize Sudan. "The Bush people have had it with Kofi Annan," says a former U.S. diplomat. "They'd like to see him go." Annan's associates say that while he has no intention of stepping down, he is feeling unprecedented pressure. "He looks good, he sounds good," says a former senior official who has worked closely with him. "But the many — and often wildly unfair — personal attacks have taken a huge toll."
The case against Kofi centers on the murk of fraud and mismanagement that occurred during the seven years of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. In 1996 the Security Council agreed to let Saddam's regime sell oil and use the revenues to buy food and medicine to alleviate the suffering caused by economic sanctions. The U.N. was in charge of overseeing both sides of the trade, but Saddam managed to skim off more than $20 billion from the $64 billion program to prop up his rule. Records found in Iraq allege that government officials and others, notably in France, Russia and China; oil companies, including American giants; and individuals, among them the senior U.N. official appointed to run the program, received preferential deals to buy Iraqi oil at below market price. Many have denied it, and there is no hint of personal impropriety by Annan. Much of Saddam's stolen revenues came from oil sales to Jordan, Turkey and Syria, which the U.S. government and the U.N. Security Council knew about. "Should members of Congress resign," asks Senator Carl Levin, "because they turned a blind eye to illegal sales Saddam made with their full knowledge?"
But the son's questionable role in the mess casts a shadow over his father. Responsibility for making sure that only authorized goods were let into Iraq was contracted out to the Swiss firm Cotecna in December 1998, just days after Kojo Annan, working for the company in West Africa, terminated his employment. When that connection emerged earlier this year, the Secretary-General said, "Neither he nor I had anything to do with contracts for Cotecna," and congressional investigators have found no evidence that either did. But as news broke that Kojo continued to be paid a monthly fee of $2,500 by Cotecna through February 2004, Annan found himself in the embarrassing position of having to make a fresh denial. "He is an independent businessman," the Secretary-General said last week. "I don't get involved with his activities, and he doesn't get involved in mine." Kojo's lawyer and Cotecna say Kojo's work had nothing to do with Iraq and that the money was the legitimate fee, required under Swiss law, for a "non-compete" agreement preventing Kojo from working for company rivals in West Africa.
Annan has appointed an independent panel led by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, to investigate the scandal. Some U.S. lawmakers are annoyed that Volcker, who expects to deliver a preliminary report to Annan in January, has refused to hand over internal audits or compel U.N. employees to testify in Washington. Volcker says all those congressional inquiries would compromise and delay his work. But some of those Congressmen wonder aloud if the U.N. can be trusted to investigate itself.
Whatever happens, the scandal will, in the eyes of some, cast an indelible shadow over Annan's once glittering resume. He got the top U.N. job in 1996 when Clinton Administration officials turned on Boutros Boutros-Ghali for trying to use the U.N. as a balance against U.S. world hegemony after the cold war, a falling-out that cost him a second term. Annan, born in Ghana in 1938, made his career as the quintessential insider. His tenure as head of U.N. peacekeeping in the 1990s was marred by the U.N.'s failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. But Washington saw him as a dedicated consensus builder who could prove more amenable to American interests than the prickly Boutros-Ghali. Now "nations that had earlier considered him America's man," says former French Ambassador to the U.S. François Bujon de l'Estang, "support him almost without reserve."
Annan has had "a brilliant first term, during which everything went right," says a former U.N. official. "His basic message of human rights fit right in with the Zeitgeist." If by 2003 the relationship between Annan and the U.S. was souring, it went rotten because of Iraq. During the prolonged crisis in the Security Council over Bush's quest for approval to invade Iraq last year, Annan stayed behind the scenes, working the phones in an intense search for unity. Yet conservatives blame him, along with the French and the Russians, for failing to line up U.N. support for the U.S.-led war. He and his aides, says John Ruggie, who worked with Annan until mid-2001, "don't like the U.S. throwing its weight around, especially when they think the Americans are wrong."
When Bush invaded anyway, Annan felt keenly the U.N.'s diminished authority to keep world peace and its paralysis in the face of American domination. At the same time, he has often spoken about the need for international involvement in Iraq. But deliberately or not, he has managed to grate on Administration officials, first by telling an interviewer in September that the war was "illegal"--"My guess is he wishes he hadn't said that," says a diplomatic official — and later by sending a letter to Bush criticizing U.S. plans to seize the restive Iraqi city of Fallujah. Annan has also come under attack for his reluctance to send enough U.N. experts back into Baghdad after 22 people, including his close friend Sergio Vieira de Mello, were killed by a car bomb at their headquarters 15 months ago. A U.N. diplomat says Georgia and Romania have offered their troops to serve as military escorts so that the U.N. can increase the number of staff members helping prepare for the January elections.
The irony of the campaign against Kofi Annan is that he may be the Secretary-General most inclined to recognize U.N. flaws and try to fix them. Last week a panel appointed by Annan a year ago proposed a sweeping overhaul of the way the lumbering world body does business, calling for expanding the Security Council and addressing when the use of force is justified. And Chris Shays, the Republican chairman of a House committee investigating oil-for-food, points out that trying to force Annan's resignation now, at a time when the U.S. very much needs the U.N. in Iraq, would be a mistake. "We have very serious work to do in the years ahead, and I want to focus on that," Annan said last week, before acknowledging, "Obviously, in this climate it is not going to be easy."
- Johanna McGeary