Washington Report On Middle East Affairs – October 2018

NO U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL is

ever going to get unanimous praise from

everyone, and certainly not in the con-

text of the Middle East. Kofi Annan, who

died in Switzerland Aug. 18 at the age of

80, came into power with some eye-

brows raised because, not only was he

the American candidate, he was also

more inclined to make space for Israel in

the organization than his predecessors

had been.

His original election had come about

against the background of the Balkan

wars, and it must be remembered that it

was the result of a U.S. veto against the

reappointment of the Egyptian Secre-

tary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who

suffered from a bipartisan alliance of

Madeleine Albright and Republican Sen.

Jesse Helms, who were both incensed

by the secretary-general’s refusal to bow

to Washington.

That, of course, made Annan the

American candidate, subject to suspicion

from others—and, indeed, his ideas of world governance and

policy were not too far from the stated principles of the Clinton

administration. However, as he was well aware, just because

an administration declared lofty ideals did not necessarily

mean it would implement them in practice.

The Clinton White House wanted to make reassuring liberal

noises about stopping atrocities to one wing of American poli-

tics, while promising the isolationist wing that it would trim

spending on the U.N. and not risk American lives even to im-

plement policies that the administration officially supported.

At the time of Rwanda, that entailed a presidential directive

from Clinton that was in essence more isolationist than any-

thing most of the Republicans could dream up: that the U.S.

would veto any peacekeeping operation that did not directly

benefit Washington’s foreign policy objective—which did not at

the time seem to include the prevention of genocide, as untold

thousands of Bosnians and Rwandans discovered.

Consistency is not common at the U.N. When Boutros-

Ghali, officially the first African secretary-general, was elected,

some Arabs were lukewarm in their welcome, criticizing his

role as Egypt’s acting foreign minister in the Camp David

peace talks—and also from sub-Saharan Africans, who did

not see him as a “real” African.

However, by the time Albright and Clinton vetoed Boutros-

Ghali’s reappointment, handing his head on a platter to Helms,

Arabs had rallied and saw the veto as an anti-Arab move. So,

many were equivocal about Annan, the new “real” African sec-

retary-general. In the end, however, they rallied around him

after his admission that the Iraq war was illegal.

Conversely, as soon as Annan showed that his tolerance for

Israel did not extend to overlooking flagrant breaches of inter-

national law, his support in Washington cooled. Helms notori-

ously invited him to wake up and smell the coffee. The George

W. Bush administration resented Annan’s diplomatic efforts to

head off the war with Iraq which the president and his advisers

were so desperately engineering.

Former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan poses during a photo session in Paris on

December 11, 2017.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real

Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Mid-

dle East Books and More).

OCTOBER 2018 WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS 51

Kofi Annan (1938-2018): Diplomacy Backed

By Forceful Intellect

By Ian Williams

United Nations Report

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