The
Five Virtues of Kofi Annan
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Annan was bred for such moments. His elder sister Essie recalls how their father, after dinner, would hold mock court sessions in which he would "try" his children for their misdeeds. Henry Reginald Annan was less interested in their excuses than in their comportment. Did they change their story? Were there holes in their logic? Did they pause and stutter and shuffle while they spoke? Kofi, his sister recalls, never hesitated. Often he would collapse the proceedings with a well-timed joke.
Awerehyemu.
When Annan, age 21, went to America in 1959 to study economics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., he was wrapped in the stuff. A picture from the period shows a couple of delighted girls fingering a kente cloth draped around Annan's shoulders. His history has always been for him like that kente cloth--protection against the elements, a cloak of awerehyemu. His presence at Macalester was a sign that the world was shrinking--an economic, technological and even, in his eyes, moral event. It would be decades before kente-cloth fashions appeared at the Gap, but Annan's arrival in the U.S. evoked a closer global community. He was instantly comfortable. "When he came back [from America]," his sister recalls, "he had a certain serenity. He looked very calm, very cool...He knew what he was about."
What Annan was about was a little bit subversive by Eisenhower-era standards. In a world buzzing with the polarizing chatter of mutually assured destruction, Annan was a committed globalist. Something about America--perhaps the striking disparity between the nation and the rest of the world--set Annan to noodling about the obligations of the powerful to the powerless. The problems of that disparity had been brewing inside his skull for some time--an obvious legacy of an African childhood of plenty in a land with little. America had a searing, sealing effect on Annan's thinking. In the long winter nights, he and his friends would cram into a beat-up old car and shoot out onto the Midwestern highways, driving through snow and ice to debating contests around the state. Annan's speech was almost always the same, a reasoned and moving pitch for global community. To the debate geeks who listened, the young man with the quiet voice was unforgettable.
Everyone on campus knew who Annan was. It was not simply that he was a handsome black man in the middle of the lily-white Midwest. It was that he carried himself with complete assurance. Today his appearance is as much an element of his ethos as his velvet voice or his poetic words. "Such elegance," a French journalist exclaimed after meeting him. "The ideas, the politics, the clothes!"
Annan is 5 ft. 9 in. tall and stands perfectly straight, but with an easy bearing, not a soldier's forced rigidity. He has an athlete's muscular build--left over from his college running days--and a trim weight that can drop as much as 10 lbs. when he is worried, or overworked, or sad--as when his twin sister died a rapid death from a still unknown disease in 1991. And he is always perfectly dressed. When journalist William Shawcross refers to him as a "secular pope," the observation is almost as much sartorial as moral. But Annan's assurance rests mostly in his eyes. Flip this magazine back to the cover, and look into them for a moment. It was often said of Gandhi that he had eyes that reflected the world's sorrows. Annan's seem to hold the world's hopes. He relies on them in negotiations and grumbles when his interlocutors look away from him to take notes or read talking points. He likes to go eye to eye. "He is captivating in the best sense of the word," says former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whom Annan has supported as a friend through difficult times. "When he approaches you," Kohl explains, "it is not possible to keep up any barriers."
Iii. Akokodur (Courage)
In dangerous situations--the kind that would have most of us tingling with a little bit of healthy fear--Annan becomes calmer, aides say. His jokes get funnier; his voice is quieter. People who worked with him in the field when he was running the U.N.'s peacekeeping division say no weather was ever too bad, no road too dangerous, no campsite too open to sniper fire for Annan. He regularly put himself in harm's way to negotiate access for medical supplies, food aid and humanitarian personnel in the world's hellholes. An aide recalls one night last year sitting with him on a Macedonian balcony overlooking Kosovo as U.S. air strikes reverberated nearby. Annan calmly chatted up world leaders by cell phone for two straight hours. He wears a thick U.N. flak jacket with as much dignity and ease as a kente cloth.
The end of the cold war brought murderous burdens that the U.N. has been unable to handle. U.N. troops are routinely asked to plunge into chaos--Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor. Annan isn't opposed to these missions. He has the courage to order the U.N. in wherever it is needed. But he has nightmares about trying to contain some of the world's most evil men with the resources of a local sheriff's department. He has tried that before: Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered by rival Hutu tribesmen; Srebrenica, Bosnia, where 8,000 Muslims were killed by Serbs. It wasn't only the U.N. that walked away from these tragedies. In both cases the Security Council--led, at times, by the U.S.--cowered. But the U.N.'s peacekeeping division, under Annan's leadership during these conflicts, bungled its attempts to implement the doctrine he would later preach. Annan now wants to ensure that his legacy isn't only a doctrine but also an institution that is capable enough--and courageous enough--to enforce it. >>MORE
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September 4,
2000 | NO. 35
C
O V E R
COVER:
The Tao of Kofi Annan
In pursuing his controversial vision for enforcing world peace, the U.N.
Secretary-General is guided by the precepts of his Fantetribe: dignity,
confidence, courage, compassion and faith
S
O U T H P A C I F I C
SYDNEY
2000: Cleaning Bill for the Olympics
How environmentally sound are the vaunted green Games?
T
H E A R T S
MUSIC:
Wyclef Jean's new solo album is a winner, but we still miss the Fugees
CINEMA:
The hilarious horror of Keenen Ivory Wayans
THEATER:
Ayckbourn's doubly dramatic West End offering
U
N I T E D S T A T E S
CAMPAIGN 2000:
George's and Al's Tax Schemes
Bush proposes a big giveback, Gore a complicated one
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
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