Who could blame him? His organization had been all but left for dead after the U.S.-led Coalition went to war without Security Council approval, briskly won the thing and set straight to work fashioning a new Iraq. Since then, Annan has at times seemed uncharacteristically unsure of himself, and oddly distracted–glancing at his watch in a meeting with his Athens staff and looking around the room even as employees were telling him the office was in an uproar over planned layoffs. Aides find him suddenly terribly tired. “I picked him up at the airport yesterday and saw him quite aged from just last month,’’ said Maria-Luisa Chavez, director of the U.N. Information Center in Athens. “It was sad.''
The people who fill up the tall building on the East River are feeling the pressure, too. U.N. officials spent some lonely weeks combing the papers for any mention of their organization, trying to reassure themselves they hadn’t been completely forgotten. Now they are back in the news, and with the Coalition struggling to cope with a society threatening to spiral out of control, there does seem to be a dawning realization among American officials that the United Nations, with its long experience in reconstruction efforts, may have something to offer after all. Americans are pushing Annan to appoint a candidate of their choosing, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, as a U.N. representative in Iraq, though Annan is not so sure he wants to be seen relegating human-rights issues to a back burner. The shift, in any case, is a step sure to gladden multilateralist hearts. “They want to share the blame with more people’’ in the complicated aftermath of the war, one U.N. official observes. “That’s what we’re here for.''
Yet the United Nations has a long way to go to regain the stature it lost over Iraq. In the coming days, the Security Council is set to vote again, on a resolution that would transfer control of Iraq’s oil from the United Nations to the United States and the United Kingdom. While U.N. bureaucrats are suitably grateful that the Americans are back before the Council at all, they also remain fearful that what their members have really been asked to do is sign off on the United Nations’ own undoing by legitimizing the Coalition’s authority in Iraq before all questions about the United Nations’ role have been settled. And it’s still squarely up to Annan to rebuild the standing and credibility of the organization, where he started as a bottom-rung budget officer four decades ago. “The future of the institution depends on how he responds to the challenge,’’ says a former U.S. official, as much as on whether President George W. Bush ultimately sides with the hawks who call him “Kofi Annoying,’’ or with his more moderate friends in the State Department, who’d rather see the United Nations reformed than retired.
Is Annan up to the job? The answer depends on whether his caution ends up paralyzing him or protecting the United Nations, keeping it viable in a time when the goals are simply to conserve and survive. Is he too tentative and polite to use the only real tool he has, the bully pulpit? People the world over were waiting for his big antiwar speech, but he never delivered anything of the kind. “He’s –not the missionary type,’’ says a key aide. “He’s very much about will it help the process, will it help the United Nations.’’ Which is why he is not about to do what his most adoring fans would like–spend some political capital and join Britain’s Tony Blair in making the case for multilateralism. His undramatic answer? Wait for passions to fade, and then wait some more, to see what jobs are actually offered the United Nations in Iraq, rather than risking rejection by vol-unteering for specific duties. For his critics, Annan’s under-caffeinated affect and tendency to go slow have only reinforced their feeling that the French-speaking, “dopey old United Nations,’’ as one Fox News commentator recently called it, should stick to worthy relief efforts and leave the masterminding to the guys with the guns.
What is not so dopey, however, is the alternative notion that Annan’s one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach is not only strategic, but actually quite shrewd. He has for weeks been resisting heavy U.S. and U.K. pressure to send an envoy to Baghdad, holding off until somebody tells him precisely what a U.N. representative would do at the postwar party. While insisting on a real rather than rubber-stamping role, he has also been trying to split the difference between the Coalition and the rest of the world in his public comments. Though this hasn’t satisfied those on either side of the Iraq issue entirely, it may be the best way to keep the United Nations alive in the long run. The long run, of course, being what the United Nations has been counting on. With Americans already tiring of the tedious, messy business of nation-building, the point seems valid. “You come from a country with a short attention span,’’ one of the United Nations’ top officials told me. Annan, on the other hand, is an exceedingly patient man.
The secretary-general spent his war at U.N. headquarters, where little knots of tense bureaucrats, all using their indoor voices, stood around watching CNN–no Franco-bashing Fox here–and not exactly cheering when the statue of Saddam Hussein came down. As an embed in his office, I mostly got to watch the compact, elegantly tailored 65-year-old “diplomatic rock star,’’ as aides call him, as he went about his usual ceremonial duties, meeting the foreign minister of Norway and having his picture taken with the Mexican ambassador. But then, diplomacy isn’t diplomacy if you can see it. Behind closed doors, he also held a series of private Security Council lunches at which no food was thrown, though one participant reported “there were tensions, and shall we say some rather unfriendly words,’’ over the salmon and lemon tart. At all hours, Annan was also working the phones, soothing the major players with his extraordinary voice, so low and lilting it would be perfect for meditational tapes. (“Imagine a pool of fresh, clear water. Beyond the pool, there are some steps, and you are going down the steps…’')
He was in particularly close touch with Colin Powell, and constantly monitoring news accounts of the State Department’s struggles with the Pentagon for possible hints about where the United Nations might fit into Washington’s plans. If anything, he became even more guarded in his own public pronouncements. One afternoon, a longtime reporter at the United Nations waylaid him as he was heading into a briefing. What did he think, she wanted to know, about Saddam’s just-announced call for a jihad? He paused, frowned. Naturally, the world’s most famous diplomat could hardly have rolled his eyes and blurted, “Well, madam, what do you think I think?’’ The answer he did give, though, failed to so much as hint that the question was a no-brainer. He’d have to get back to her on that, he said. “When I come back.''
Though he did not shirk his PR duties, he did weary of them, and showed it. One afternoon, in an interview with Al-Jazeera, the Arab correspondent asked him–several times, actually–to respond to widespread feeling in the Muslim world that he could have prevented the war if he hadn’t pulled U.N. staff out of Iraq the day before the fighting began. “That is wrong,’’ he said flatly, clasping his hands together in front of his chest, almost as if in prayer. “The war was about to begin. How much longer should I have kept them there?’’ By the end of the interview, he was bristling–proving that, contrary to U.N. legend, he is perfectly capable of everyday pique, at least these days.
Annan wasn’t the only one feeling out of –sorts, either. The U.N. staff was so demoralized that he sent out a memo urging employees to buck up and believe that “the United Nations family may come out of this difficult experience more relevant than ever.’’ Meanwhile, however, divisions in the Security Council were being played out all over the building. Americans said they were feeling incredible hostility from colleagues, some of whom gloated openly when it briefly seemed as though the fighting might drag on for a while. One of Annan’s senior aides lamented, “It’s a little sad, actually, how little it would take’’ in the way of American concessions “to get the world onboard’’ in Iraq. But then, the condescension with which many U.N. officials regard the hyperpower cannot be helping their cause. “It may be we have not done a good-enough job of educating them,’’ another top Annan adviser said of the Bush administration. Over and over, I heard officials say that in the end, the United States would probably have to “learn the hard way’’ that it still needs the rest of the world. “We call it reality therapy,’’ said Elisabeth Lindenmayer, Annan’s longtime executive assistant.
As a proud pragmatist, however, Annan himself is all too aware that he can’t hope to preserve any meaningful role without American support. Unless we think that the United States now intends to respond to each and every global issue with unilateral military force, he seems just as reasonable in believing that job-sharing is likewise in America’s long-term interest. Also in Annan’s favor is the perception that he may be a functionary, but he’s our functionary–far and away the most pro-American secretary-general the United Nations has ever had. His elevation to the job was engineered by Americans, under President Bill Clinton, and he was chosen in part for his appealing lack of ego–some would say malleability.
In much of the Arab world, he is regarded as “America’s secretary-general.’’ Last year there were posters all over the West Bank of Annan with his eyes gouged out–replaced by one U.S. and one Israeli flag. “We do think that to his credit he understands that having good relations with the United States is important to the United Nations,’’ says one U.S. official. Annan’s pro-American reputation may be one reason he does not seem to be particularly popular among the U.N. rank and file. They complain that the most onerous cutbacks of staff have happened during his tenure. He’s blamed for such outrages as caving to pressure to force all U.N. employees to take two Muslim holidays off each year. And he is viewed as more of a fixture on the Upper East Side social circuit than on the lower floors of his own building.
Annan’s office on the 38th floor is so high up that he has a better view of Queens than of the East River just beneath his windows. But the most remarkable thing about the space is how unoccupied it looks, with no humanizing hint of clutter. His manner is rather grave, appropriately so in a time of war. As he speaks, he does not appear to be particularly absorbed by what he’s saying. On the contrary, he seems to be taking in more than he’s putting out, and when he speaks at exactly the pace of my note-taking, it is not a happy coincidence but an act of courtesy.
With “millions of people marching through the streets urging their governments to work with the Security Council and the United Nations,’’ he argues, the organization’s relevance has never been more prominently displayed. He mentions the ideals of the U.N. Charter, the shared values expressed in international law–but then, he concedes, “In a way, perhaps this will not convince a man sitting in Middle America.’’ If he could magically make any one change in the United Nations overnight, how would he like to shake things up? He exhales a small laugh. “It’s such an unlikely possibility that I haven’t thought about it,’’ he says, rubbing his hands together. “It would be wonderful, but I haven’t.''
His preferred method of deflecting questions about himself is to answer with such remove that you’d swear he was neutral even on the subject of Kofi Annan. When I bring up the highly personal matter of religion, mentioning someone to whom he had spoken about the power of prayer, he looks truly horrified. “Not in a sanctimonious way’’ is he a person of faith, he says after a while. “But yes, I am a believer.’’ Because he reveals so little of himself, none of his colleagues say they feel close to him. “He’s warm and remembers the name of your child, but he’s difficult to know,’’ says Lindenmayer. “There’s a large part of him we don’t have access to.''
Annan was born in Ghana, the son of traditional tribal leaders on both sides of the family, and was educated in his country’s most elite schools. His keen sense of the possible, he says, comes from watching the Ghanaian struggle for independence. “Growing up and listening to your parents,’’ he says, “it seemed so remote, yet it happened, so you walk away in the most formative time in your life thinking change is possible.’’ It is not really surprising to learn that as a young man, this lover of order and organization had carefully plotted a political career, intending to make his mark in the business world from the age of 25 to 45, spend the years between his 45th and 60th birthdays in public service, then take up farming late in life and die in his bed at 80.
Instead, he studied at an American college, Macalester, in Minnesota, where he was a –record-breaking track star, and, after attending graduate school in Switzerland, signed on with the World Health Organization in 1962. He rose steadily through the U.N. ranks in a career crowned by the honor of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. “Things just happen to him,’’ marvels someone who has known him for years. But he has also been witness to some of the most horrific events of his lifetime, particularly as the head of U.N. peacekeeping. It was on his watch, in 1994, that 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda. No country was willing to send peacekeeping troops, and he did not make himself a hero by resigning in protest over the world’s indifference. “He could have screamed to the press, ‘These are my African people, and I’m quitting,’ and he didn’t,’’ says someone who worked on the issue with him at the time. “But if he failed, we all failed.’’ The next year, 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were wiped out in Srebrenica, a designated U.N. safe area, after the peacekeepers ran away. It was not long after that, in 1995, that Annan–while filling in for his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was unreachable–agreed to the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs that finally forced them to the negotiating table. And it was that bold decision that convinced the Americans Annan should become the next secretary-general.
When he retires in four years–“when all this is past,’’ as his wife, Nane, puts it–he still wants to farm in Ghana–a dream that must seem all the more alluring just now. But I am curious about the ways in which he’s been Americanized by all his years in New York. Well, he likes sports, and jazz–and, he insists, the openness and informality of American life. “Of course I tease, and sometimes friends tease me, too. I used to give nicknames,’’ he says quietly. “I don’t do it anymore.’'
The advent of war had caught Annan by far greater surprise than it should have; as late as Thanksgiving he was still telling friends he was convinced that President Bush was leaning against military action in Iraq. And as hostilities quickly wound down, Annan became anxious to take his show on the road. For the trip to Athens, he and his wife, a Swedish artist and former judge, swept into Kennedy airport at the last moment, greeting staff they’d probably seen earlier that day like lost relations.
Annan met his wife, who is a niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic rescuer of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, in Geneva, when both were working at the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. It is a second marriage for both, and they certainly looked very much in love in this February’s “Couples Issue’’ of Vogue. Despite their high-profile canoodling, however, the first thing Mrs. Annan says to me, in an interview in their hotel suite in Athens, is “I hope you’ll understand that we’re very private people.’’ She has tea served, and the kind of beautiful little pastries, each one an architectural triumph, that are impossible to eat discreetly, so no one tries. Asked in some incredibly benign way–on a par, say, with something Barbara Walters might ask a best-supporting-actress contender on Oscar night–to explain her husband, Mrs. Annan declines, not quite as politely as one might expect–“I was an artist and a lawyer,’’ she says, “not a psychologist’’–though she does reveal that he is so efficient he “refuses to touch a piece of paper –more than once’’ and keeps an extremely tidy desk. Her eyes fill with tears as she mentions a favorite photo of him cupping the face of an old woman from Kosovo in his hands. She speaks of his aura, his charisma, his deep African wisdom. And even though she’s hating this, and so am I, it’s impossible not to see something remarkable in a woman who after 22 years does not seem to view her husband as quite mortal.
He certainly was not at his best on the trip, yet one could argue that when it mattered most, in his one-on-one with Tony Blair, Annan was completely resolute, resisting the British prime minister’s entreaties that he send a special U.N. representative to Iraq as soon as possible, just to get the United Nations’ foot in the door. Blair had left Annan looking frail by comparison when he arrived at the meeting, striding into the room in complete command, shaking hands all round. But it was Annan who refused to budge, telling Blair repeatedly that the United Nations would not send an envoy without a specific mandate and absent authorization from the Security Council. The message being that Blair’s lobbying was simply misdirected.
He also carefully edited his speech to the European leaders, personally deleting a slightly combative line about how the United Nations would not accept a junior role in Iraq, though it would have been a definite crowd-pleaser. And for all the pique directed at the United Nations recently by American officials from Bush on down, it’s significant that Annan himself has mostly avoided the kind of personal attacks that American conservatives regularly launched at his predecessor–maybe partly because U.N. critics really seemed to enjoy saying his name, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Annan’s supporters are fond of referring to him as the “secular pope,’’ and the one way in which that does seem apt is that a surprising number of the people who are angry with Annan’s institution tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. “In all fairness, the problem at the United Nations is not with the secretary-general, but in the Security Council,’’ says Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. “I don’t know that there’s much he could do.''
Several of his friends told me this is probably the hardest time in Annan’s life, though there are surely other strong contenders for that prize. But Annan in any case seems to have remarkably few regrets about what cannot now be changed. He does not really believe in regrets, and they apparently leave him alone, too. Naturally, he prefers to focus on the lives saved by U.N. humanitarian operations, and is proudest, he says, of his efforts to move poverty issues up a notch on the world’s agenda and start a global AIDS fund.
So he really does not rue his 1998 visit to Saddam, after which he famously called the dictator a man he could do business with? Absolutely not, he says, in a second interview, near the end of the Athens trip. “Is that what you thought I’d say?’’ To him, saying Saddam was a man he could do business with was simply a statement of fact, since he had just done business with him. (He got Saddam to agree to let inspectors back into the country, though the Iraqi leader soon broke his promise to let the inspectors do their work.) “It was worthwhile to have made the effort’’ anyway, Annan insists, uncrossing and then recrossing his legs. “It wasn’t for Saddam, but to get him to do what he had to do. I probably would have regretted it more for not trying.’’ After Saddam made a fool of him, though, Annan stayed out of the Iraq issue almost entirely. Yet a secretary-general who was more aggressive and engaged on Iraq might well have responded to the United States in a way that would have done far more permanent damage to the U.N.-U.S. relationship. Sometimes, the best thing a leader can do is know his limits.
Near the end of my last conversation with Annan, I ask how he knows when it’s time to pull the plug on diplomacy, and he smiles. “It’s important not to create the impression that you never come to a conclusion, but it has to be pretty clear that one couldn’t possibly take it any further.’’ Does he, like so many of his aides, also think that the United States will now “have to learn the hard way’’ in Iraq? “One always learns the hard way,’’ he begins. “But I hope…’’ He trails off, stops and tries again. “One can learn…’’ Then, suddenly, surprisingly, we arrive at the exact point at which diplomacy does end. “Oh, drop that!’’ he says, with a wave of the hand. And for the first time in my presence, he really lets go and laughs.
