Frank words for Annan in effort to revitalize UN
By Warren Hoge The New York Times Monday, January 3, 2005
UNITED NATIONS, New York The crisis meeting of veteran foreign policy experts in a Manhattan apartment one recent Sunday was held in agreed-upon secrecy.
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The high profile guest of honor came unaccompanied by his usual retinue of aides and without the knowledge of most of his closest advisers. The mission, in the words of one participant, was clear - "to save Kofi and rescue the UN."
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At the gathering, Secretary General Kofi Annan listened quietly to three and a half hours of bluntly worded counsel from a group united in their personal regard for him and support for the United Nations, but deeply concerned that lapses in his leadership over the past two years had eclipsed the accomplishments of his first term and were jeopardizing chances of making the remaining two years of his term meaningful.
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They began by arguing that Annan had to refresh his top management team. The first move will occur this week with an announcement that Mark Malloch Brown, a Briton who heads the United Nations Development Program and is one of the organization's most dynamic figures, is to replace Annan's longtime chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, who announced his resignation on Dec. 22.
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The larger argument, according to participants, addressed two broad needs. First, Annan had to move aggressively to repair relations with Washington where, they said, the administration and many in Congress thought he and the United Nations had worked actively against President George W. Bush's reelection. And second, he had to restore his relationship with his own bureaucracy, where workers felt his office protected high-level officials accused of misconduct.
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In the days following the session, Annan sought and obtained a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, the incoming secretary of state, that United Nations officials viewed positively, and he traveled on to Brussels to see European Union leaders.
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The secret gathering came at the end of a year that Annan has described as the organization's "annus horribilis," a year in which the United Nations faced charges of corruption in the way it ran the oil-for-food program in Iraq, evidence that blue-helmeted peacekeepers in Congo ran prostitution rings and raped women and teenage girls and formal motions of no confidence in the organization's senior management from staff unions.
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Just days before the Dec. 5 gathering, Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who heads a subcommittee investigating the oil-for-food program, had brought criticism of the United Nations to a boil by calling for Annan's resignation.
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The United Nations faces major institutional challenges in the new year - the Jan. 30 vote in Iraq that United Nations electoral experts helped set up, the preliminary report late this month of the oil-for-food inquiry led by Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman and the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, which is testing the organization's leadership in coordinating humanitarian assistance on a global scale.
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The meeting was held in the apartment of Richard Holbrooke, who was the United States ambassador to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton.
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The others there were John Ruggie, assistant secretary general for strategic planning from 1997 to 2001 and now a professor of international relations at Harvard's Kennedy School, Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Timothy Wirth, the president of the Washington-based United Nations Foundation.
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Also present were Kathy Bushkin, the foundation's executive vice president, Nader Mousavizadeh, a former special assistant to Annan who now works at Goldman Sachs, and Robert Orr, the assistant secretary general for strategic planning since August.
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Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, was invited but could not attend because of commitments in Bahrain.
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"The intention was to keep it confidential," Holbrooke said. "No one wanted to give the impression of a group of outsiders, all of them Americans, dictating what to do to a secretary general."
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He described the group as people "who care deeply about the UN and believe that the UN cannot succeed if it is in open dispute and constant friction with its founding nation, its host nation and its largest contributor nation. The UN, without the U.S. behind it, is a failed institution."
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None of the participants would discuss the remarks that were made in any detail. "Secret advice, such as it is, is effective to the extent that it is kept that way," Ruggie said.
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But one participant, who requested anonymity, said that Annan remained quiet throughout the session and made no promises - nor was asked to - at its end.
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"He sat in silence and made no effort to defend himself," the onlooker said.
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"He was taking it all in. It wasn't a conversation, it was much more of a 'here is the situation, here are the choices on what you can do'."
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Holbrooke said that the talk, while unalloyed, was not confrontational. "There was nothing adversarial about it," Holbrooke said.
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"Kofi knew he was in a meeting with people who cared deeply about him and about the institution."
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One of the members of the group had prepared for the session by finding out if the Bush administration was siding with those in Congress who were calling for Annan's resignation or whether instead they supported his resolve to stay in office until the Jan. 31, 2006, end of his term.
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The official, a onetime senior government figure in Washington with good ties to the Bush administration, said he had concluded that "they were not going to draw the sword against Kofi."
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"Everyone I talked to, including the White House, said that if Kofi was going to go, it was going to be by the hand of the Volcker report, not by the hand of the Bush administration."
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He said that there were too many people in Annan's inner circle "who love to take potshots at the U.S. without focusing on the essentiality of the U.S. in getting things done" and that Annan was encouraged to make changes.
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"The secretary general missed an opportunity at the end of the first term to reenergize his top team as an American president would do, for example," he said.
