Daily Times

Kofi Annan was a man known for making history. He was the first-ever Secretary General to rise to the top from within the ranks of the UN itself. Yet he will be forever remembered as the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to serve as the world body chief.

He held this position for almost a decade; from 1997-2006. And it was during this period that he witnessed at close quarters just what the organisation — that emblem of multilateralism — was up against when the international community’s most powerful nations refused to honour the Charter to which they had consensually signed up.

Iraq. This war of aggression waged by Britain and the US in 2003 set those who ruled the world on a collision course with the institution that was tasked with governing it. On the one side, George W Bush tried his darnedest to secure Security Council backing to militarily overthrow the Saddam regime; taunting the world body with either getting with the programme or risking utter irrelevance. While the UN chief repeatedly warned that any pre-emptive aggression would violate its Charter, the US and UK decided to act unilaterally. By the following year, Kofi had gone ‘rogue’; pronouncing the intervention as being without legal basis. And he would, in 2012, go as far as to hold Britain’s Tony Blair responsible for failing to stop the carnage before it began. To date, Mr Annan, who had no direct role to play in the conflict, is the only one to have demonstrated true remorse for Iraq. Even as the ramifications of this unjust war are still being endured in the Middle East and beyond.

Such introspection is a rare quality and one that was the hallmark of Kofi’s long and incredibly illustrious career. Back in the mid-1990s, when he was serving as head of the UN peacekeeping mission, two acts of genocide occurred that ought to have shaken the world of so-called peace-loving nations to the core: Rwanda and Srebrenica. Both occurred on his watch and Kofi felt the tragedies keenly. He would go on to say that these massacres proceeded to shape his worldview. In his Nobel Lecture at the end of 2001 — delivered after he and the UN were jointly awarded the Centennial Peace Prize — Kofi observed: “The rights of the individual are of no less importance to immigrants and minorities in Europe and the Americas than to women in Afghanistan or children in Africa.” This stark warning came a full decade before the start of the Syrian war prompted a devastating refugee crisis that would scramble towards the iron doors of Fortress Europe.

And now that he has gone, all of us have lost not just a son of Africa but, truly, a champion of the world. A veritable man of peace in a world of war.  *

Published in Daily Times, August 19^th 2018.