U.N.’s Savvy New Secretary Comes Politicking to Washington

UNITED NATIONS — When U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrives in Washington today for his first official visit, his initial meeting--before sessions with President Clinton, Sen. Jesse Helms, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the National Press Club--will be a 45-minute chat with the 10-member Minnesota congressional delegation.

Annan, born in the West African nation of Ghana, had his first exposure to America in the early 1960s as an undergraduate at small Macalester College in St. Paul. He’ll use that personal connection in what a U.N. staff member calls a bit of “constituent building” among the Minnesotans, who soon will be voting with the rest of Congress on whether to pay the $1.3 billion in back dues the U.S. owes the United Nations.

The meeting with the Minnesotans--Annan’s idea--says two important things about the new U.N. leader: It reveals an informed appreciation of the nuances of the U.S. political system and illustrates the personal touch he brings to the job.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Annan’s predecessor as secretary-general, had neither of those traits. That partly explains why he was banished at the insistence of the United States and replaced by Annan. But the larger issues that defeated Boutros-Ghali--the United Nations’ confused mission in a post-Cold War universe, its financial instability and the incessant demands for “reform” from the United States--remain.

Annan has promised to attack these problems straight away, and the trip to Washington, which ends Friday, is part of his strategy. He will listen to ideas for reorienting and reforming the United Nations while pressing Congress and the Clinton administration to meet the United States’ financial obligations to the world body. He plans similar visits to other global capitals, leading to the introduction of his U.N. reform plan by midyear.

It is a formidable agenda. But few who have watched Annan during his more than three decades as an international civil servant suggest he is not up to the task.

Here is someone who has successfully negotiated with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but is so soft-spoken one sometimes must strain to hear him in conversation. He is the kind of boss who remembers birthdays of subordinates’ children and the kind of diplomat unafraid to wound feelings of fellow Africans by criticizing the authoritarian tendencies of many of the continent’s leaders.

He chafes at the pomp and security that has descended on him with his new post. But he is comfortable with its power--one of his first acts was to demand the resignation of all top deputies installed by Boutros-Ghali.

The administration came to deeply appreciate Annan’s talents in the fall of 1995, when Boutros-Ghali dispatched him to the Balkans as the new U.N. special representative to the former Yugoslav federation. The United Nations’ floundering effort in the region then was seen in Washington and elsewhere as a failure; around U.N. headquarters, Annan’s appointment was seen by some as a cunning attempt by Boutros-Ghali to discredit a potential rival.

“The idea was that Bosnia was a place where nobody could come out looking very good,” noted Muhamed Sacirbey, U.N. ambassador from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But Annan handled the job--including coordinating the transfer of military authority from the U.N. to NATO-led forces--with such skill that it had precisely the opposite effect. “He was probably the only person who came out of that thing with his reputation not only intact, but enhanced,” said a senior U.S. official.

“He simply has an operating style, an approach and a demeanor that inspires confidence,” the official added. “It’s hard not to both respect and like him.”

A few months later, the administration decided to veto a second term for Boutros-Ghali and quietly supported Annan as his successor.

Annan, 58, took office Jan. 1 and quickly established his leadership style. In contrast to the secretive, aloof Boutros-Ghali, Annan has been open with the U.N. staff and the world media.

Through what he calls “judicious delegation to my senior colleagues,” Annan enforced a new accountability on the world body’s vast bureaucracy. He swiftly replaced U.N. administrators in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Rwanda who were accused of sexual harassment and inefficiency. He accelerated the appointment of a U.N. representative to violence-torn Central Africa. And he appointed as advisors on reform two Americans and a Canadian believed sympathetic to dramatic reorganization.

“There’s been an extraordinary sigh of relief at the U.N. as he’s assumed the office,” said one U.S. official.

Annan’s popularity among the U.N. staff and his eagerness to take on issues stem in large part from his extensive knowledge of the organization. He is the first secretary-general to rise through the ranks, having held personnel, budget, economic and administrative posts before becoming undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations in 1993.

But his willingness to immerse himself in a new experience dates at least to his college days. When he arrived at Macalester, it was the first time he had lived outside Africa. His principal memory of his freshman year, he says now, was climate shock. “You can imagine: I had never been through winter before, and my first was in Minnesota,” he recalled with a laugh.

But Annan also was one of the few blacks at the school at a time when the civil rights movement was just beginning to bridge America’s racial gap.

His father was a businessman who also served as a provincial governor in Ghana, and his mother was a housewife. Besides an economics degree from Macalester, Annan holds a master’s degree from M.I.T. and has studied at the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva.

His wife, Nane, is a Swedish-born lawyer who quit practicing to pursue a successful career as an abstract painter. She is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who is credited with saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary during World War II. Wallenberg disappeared after the war and presumably died at the hands of the Soviets. The Annans have three children.

Annan’s U.N. career began in 1962 at the World Health Organization and has taken him to Geneva; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Cairo and Ismailia, Egypt; as well as New York. In an address to the U.N. staff shortly after his selection, Annan talked about the idealism that drew him to the United Nations.

“Service with the United Nations is more than just a job,” he said. “It is a calling. No one joins the Secretariat to become rich and famous, to be appreciated and applauded, to live a life of ease and comfort. We join the United Nations because we want to serve the world community, because we believe this planet can be a better and more secure place and because, above all, we want to devote our time, our intellect and our energies to making it so.”

When he became director of peacekeeping, Annan inherited a department that closed its doors at 5 p.m. daily, often leaving commanders under fire in places such as Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, unable to reach their superiors in a crisis. Annan upgraded and reorganized the department, opening a round-the-clock operations center. In a place where unpleasant facts often are disguised in bland euphemisms, Annan developed a reputation for straight talk about U.N. limits as well as accomplishments.

Now he will bring that mix of candor, humor and idealism to Washington, where people such as Helms--the Republican from North Carolina who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--regard the United Nations with a suspicion bordering on hostility.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), who has known the Annans for years, believes the secretary-general will succeed.

“I think he’ll be able to make a major breakthrough on the Hill,” Lantos said. “ The major task Kofi Annan has is to gain the confidence of the leadership in the House and the Senate. If he gains that confidence, and I think he will, Congress will respond.”