Kofi Annan

79

Kofi Annan : biography

8 April 1938 – living

Memoir

On 4 September 2012, Annan published his memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, written with Nader Mousavizadeh, ISBN 978-159420420-3. The book is described as a personal biography of so-called global statecraft.

Early years and education

Kofi Annan was born in Kumasi in the Gold Coast on 8 April 1938. His twin sister Efua Ataa, who died in 1991, shares the middle name Atta, which in Fante and Akan means ‘twin’. Annan and his sister were born into one of the country’s aristocratic families; both their grandfathers and their uncle were tribal chiefs., Saga Magazine, November 2002

In the Akan names tradition, some children are named according to the day of the week on which they were born, and/or in relation to how many children precede them. Kofi in Akan is the name that corresponds with Friday. dictionary.kasahorow.com

Pronunciation: Annan has said his surname rhymes with "cannon" in English.

From 1954 to 1957, Annan attended the elite Mfantsipim school, a Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in the 1870s. Annan has said that the school taught him "that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere". PBS In 1957, the year Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, the Gold Coast gained independence from Britain and began using the name "Ghana".

In 1958, Annan began studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology of Ghana. He received a Ford Foundation grant, enabling him to complete his undergraduate studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, in 1961. Annan then did a DEA degree in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1961–62. After some years of work experience, he studied at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1971–72) in the Sloan Fellows program and earned a Master of Science (M.S.) degree.

Annan is fluent in English, French, Akan, some Kru languages and other African languages., The Elders

Secretary-General of the United Nations

Appointment

On 13 December 1996, the United Nations Security Council recommended Annan to replace the previous Secretary-General, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, whose second term faced the veto of the United States. Confirmed four days later by the vote of the General Assembly, he started his first term as Secretary-General on 1 January 1997.

Activities

In April 2001, Annan issued a five-point "Call to Action" to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Stating it was a "personal priority", Annan proposed a Global AIDS and Health Fund to stimulate the increased international spending needed to help developing countries confront the HIV/AIDS crisis. On 10 December 2001, Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world".

In the years after 1998 when UNSCOM was kicked out by the government of Saddam Hussein and during the Iraq disarmament crisis, in which the United States blamed UNSCOM and former IAEA director Hans Blix for failing to properly disarm Iraq, Scott Ritter the former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector, blamed Annan for being slow and ineffective in enforcing Security Council resolutions on Iraq and was overtly submissive to the demands of the Clinton administration for regime removal and inspection of sites, often Presidential palaces, that were not mandated in any resolution and were of questionable intelligence value, which severely hampered UNSCOM’s ability to cooperate with the Iraqi government and contributed to their expulsion from the country. Ritter also claimed that Annan regularly interfered with the work of the inspectors and diluted the chain of command by trying to micromanage all of the activities of UNSCOM, which caused intelligence processing (and the resulting inspections) to be backed up and caused confusion with the Iraqis as to who was in charge and as a result, they generally refused to take orders from Ritter or Rolf Ekéus without explicit approval from Annan, which could have taken days, if not weeks. He later believed that Annan was oblivious to the fact the Iraqis took advantage of this in order to delay inspections. He claimed that on one occasion, Annan refused to implement a no-notice inspection of the SSO headquarters and instead tried to negotiate access, but the negotiation ended up taking nearly six weeks, giving the Iraqis more than enough time to clean out the site.