How should former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan be remembered?

Question

Would like to hear what the average person thinks.

Answer 1

As a pontificating and incompetent liberal. He has done nothing productive and has consistently stood against American interests.

Answer 2

Not sure- since he is only the secretary of the UN and isn't particularly powerful. What is interesting is this hyterical need to leave behind a legacy. What is going on? The problems in the world are very complex and yet we still believe that somehow, ONE person can fix many things. It's very strange!

Answer 3

Ah Kofi. Our wonderful black brotha. He should and will be remembered for becoming the first person from a black African nation to serve as Secretary-General. But honestly, does anyone ever actually remember these characters who head the United Nations? The entire establishment is a joke.

Answer 4

If the laws were just and the ones that keep them he should be in jail for getting kick backs for the oil for food sham but instead he gave up his son. lol What a guy!!

Answer 5

Annan had a mixed legacy but should be remembered for transforming the UN from a “club of states” to a reinvigorated institution with a greater role that in many cases worked on behalf of people against states. On one hand, he championed humanitarian values as universal properties and pushed the notion of a responsibility to protect in the face of opposition by three fourths of the members on the grounds of sovereignty. On the other, as the UN grew, it became defined by a culture of dysfunction. The Oil for Food scandal, for its part, exposed an organization without an ability to manage big, complicated things.

Annan’s term has been marked by scandal: from the sexual abuse of women and children in the Congo by UN peacekeepers to the greatest financial scam in history, the UN-administered oil-for-food programme.

It was Mr. Annan, when he was head of the United Nation's peacekeeping office, who could have prevented the slaughter of 800,000 Tutus and their sympathizers in Rwanda in 1994.

Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, head of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, urgently pleaded with Mr. Annan to intervene before the killings began, because Mr. Dallaire knew of the preparations for the genocide. Mr. Annan refused to act, or to say anything publicly. Annan acknowledged that the UN and its member states failed Rwanda and its people during the 100-day genocide.

The Oil-for-Food program involving Iraq was ultimately under the direct control of Annan, who signed off on every aspect of it, including the selection of a company with links to his son to administer it. The program's Executive Director Benon Sevan was a close friend and veteran diplomat hand-picked for the job by Annan.

Annan was forced to disband the UN Commission on Human Rights after Western complaints over human-rights abusers (Cuba, Libya, et al.) running the show. Yet his “reform” solution, the much-vaunted Human Rights Council, is just as bad. It has been unwilling even to condemn the regime in Khartoum over the crisis in Darfur.

Annan, indeed was Secretary General at a time when the world was most insecure; but, always, he insisted on the values of global peace and security.he cold war may have ended, but the challenges of being human and a united world have remained daunting in the last ten years and beyond. Annan demonstrated an understanding of the issues that was striking in its purposefulness; he applied a common touch that bore the imprints of charisma; and on development issues, he was an activist and a prophet.

Human rights, development and global responsibility were his constant refrain over the years, and he reclaimed a role for the UN as a standard setter, making development a global issue.
Annan's quiet authority and palpable decency made him a perfect standard-bearer both for the organization and for these values.
It was precisely those strengths that the xenophobic wing of the US media tried to undermine in his second term, when he stated the obvious truths about Washington's disregard for international law and human rights, most notably in Iraq.

Tt would have been easy to sidestep contentious issues, but Annan chose to wade in. His report, titled Uniting Against Terrorism-Recommendations for a Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, sent out the moral message that terrorism is unacceptable and unjustifiable. It also identified conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism—conflicts, extremist ideologies, political exclusion and socioeconomic marginalization—and called for a concrete action plan to tackle on-the-ground terrorist threats through a multiple strategy of dissuasion, denial, deterrence, capacity development and defense of human rights. In effect, Annan’s report demonstrated that the elusiveness of a definition of terrorism need not preempt an operational strategy for combating it. Because of Annan we have come to realize that the only way the World can achieve a breakthrough on the issue of terrorism is to focus on the practicalities of a counterterrorism strategy. No matter how much member states differ on the definition of terrorism, Annan reasoned they share the common interest in stable development. This common interest ultimately proved decisive.

Those who study the United Nations say one of Kofi Annan's greatest triumphs was persuading member states to agree on a principle known as "the responsibility to protect." The principle addresses the issue of intervening in cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing, such as in Rwanda. So what do you do, though, when a government is not protecting its own people? What do you do when there is no rule of law -- like in Somalia, where you've got competing factions? What do you do when there is, as we saw in Rwanda with genocide - what do you do to protect those who need protection within a country?

The doctrine that Kofi Annan championed, that the world's nations have the "responsibility to protect" those who are helpless in the face of power or tragedy, has now been accepted by the United Nations. The key issue regarding whether or not Annan's tenure as U.N. Secretary General was a success or not will be whether the U.N. and the nations of our world find the means to implement this doctrine of Annan's.


I believe that Annan has done more than any predecessor to insure that those invoked in the opening words of the UN Charter, "We the peoples of the world," have a serious place on the UN agenda.

Answer 6

A man that sought a peaceful world through diplomacy but failed.

Answer 7

uhhh, he married a nice looking white woman and he is a real good man.

Answer 8

pretty much another Jimmy Carter..he may have meant well, but he was an incompetent moron

Answer 9

I expect to forget him, personally.

Answer 10

He was great on "Good Times".