Kofi Annan and the Art of Puppetry

Annan took office in January 1997, in the aftermath of his support of U.S. policy demands in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He had been one of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s subordinates and in his boss’s absence Annan took it upon himself to approve Operation Deliberate Force, the U.S. bombing of Bosnian-Serb targets in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of August 1995 . In To End A War , Richard Holbrooke’s memoir of the time he spent representing the Clinton administration as its chief negotiator with the warring parties in the former Yugoslavia, Holbrooke asserts that this action assured Kofi Annan’s future as a UN leader: “When [Operation Deliberate Force] was all over and we could assess who had been most helpful, my Washington colleagues usually singled out Kofi Annan at the United Nations, and Willy Claes and General Joulwan at NATO. Annan’s gutsy performance in those 24 hours was to play a central role in Washington’s strong support for him a year later as the successor to Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Indeed, in a sense Annan won the job that day.” 

Some 16 months after Annan’s approval of the U.S. bombing of Bosnian Serb positions, he replaced Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose reelection was blocked by the United States. Kofi Annan didn’t disappoint Holbrooke and his associates. Throughout the Yugoslav struggle and up to the present he has followed the U.S.-NATO party line on the issues there, according to which everything wrong has been attributable to the Serbs. He, therefore, accepted the unrestrained use of the Yugoslav Tribunal in servicing U.S.-NATO war aims, the refusal to negotiate a settlement of the Kosovo crisis, and the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, which was in violation of the UN Charter. In his report on the Srebrenica massacre ( The Fall of Srebrenica , November 1999), Annan states that in both Bosnia and Kosovo “the international community tried to reach a negotiated settlement with an unscrupulous and murderous regime. In both instances it required the use of force to bring a halt to the planned and systematic killing and expulsion of civilians.” This is blatant disinformation, as it is well established that the United States sabotaged the 1992 Lisbon Accord, which had been accepted by the Serbs in Bosnia, that the “planned” expulsion of civilians (Operation Horseshoe) was a propaganda fraud, and that the Clinton administration deliberately “raised the bar” in the Rambouillet talks of 1999 so as to assure the failure of negotiations over Kosovo because the Serbs needed a little bombing. These lies helped sustain Annan’s support for the 1999 bombing war, which was as clear a violation of the UN Charter as Bush’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

As a logical follow-up, in February 2004 Annan appointed Louise Arbour as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Arbour, who had been vetted by Madeleine Albright for the prosecutor’s job for the Yugoslav Tribunal, served in that function before and during the NATO 78-day bombing war, where she played a special role in using a purported judicial body to facilitate a major UN Charter violation and the commission of serious war crimes (see Christopher Black and Edward Herman. “An Unindicted War Criminal: Louise Arbour and the International Crimes Tribunal,” Z Magazine , February 2000; Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder ). Arbour is now busily engaged in trying to liquidate the UN Human Rights Commission that she heads, with Annan’s support, because the United States does not like its mode of operation and failure to do the U.S. bidding. (Her role here may be similar to that which John Bolton will likely play in the UN.) Arbour, whose service to NATO as Tribunal prosecutor was the ultimate in politicization, wants to make these changes because the Commission is “politicized.” Translated, it has been serving the wrong interests. (On liquidating the UN Human Rights Commission, see “The OHCHR Plan of Action: Protection and Empowerment,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, May 2005.) 

Kofi Annan played an ugly role in the Bush ouster of the democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti. As reported by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “In the days preceding the February 29, 2004 de facto ouster of Aristide and his U.S. arranged flight into exile, Annan echoed U.S. policy in condemning Aristide as Haiti’s ‘failed’ president and Powell’s cynical scenario that international peacekeepers would be sent to Haiti, but only if Aristide abrogated most of his constitutionally mandated authority. Annan’s backing of Powell’s strategy legitimated Washington’s goal of ridding itself of Aristide. At today’s talks, a politically weakened Annan is likely to discuss next year’s Haiti elections and how to minimize a role for the pro-Aristide Lavalas party.” (Seth DeLong, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “Aiding Oppression in Haiti: Kofi Annan and General Heleno’s Complicity in Latorture’s Jackal Regime,” December 16, 2004.) As the situation has deteriorated further and the Jackal Regime continues to brutalize and kill, the UN mission and Annan have done nothing constructive (see Marcela Valente, “Haiti: Human Rights Delegation Echoes Growing Criticism of UN Mission,” Inter Press Service News Agency, April 8, 2005). 

In dealing with the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, Kofi Annan has bent over backwards to accommodate the United States and Israel. Although Israel is in violation of dozens of UN resolutions, has violated them seriously for years and does so now on a daily basis, Annan does not press for enforcement. When Israel refused to allow a UN on-site study of the attack on Jenin, he accepted this meekly, in marked contrast with his aggressive pursuit of enforcement of rulings against Serbia in the conflicts in that area. Even his language tilts in a one-sided way, as he is indignant over suicide bombings, which he regularly “strongly condemns,” but only expresses regrets or “grave concern” at Israeli violence (for illustrations and discussion of this double standard, see David Peterson, “Principals of World Order II,” ZNet Blogs, October 5, 2004). 

As regards Iraq, Annan remained silent from the time of his taking office in 1997 on the “sanctions of mass destruction” imposed by the UN on Iraq (essentially, by the United States and Britain) and the systematic and illegal bombing of Iraq by the U.S.-British axis of preemptive violence. His performance as the United States was setting the stage to invade Iraq was enlightening as to his mode of operation. He tried to channel the United States and Britain into accepting the inspections regime and into agreement to abide by a Security Council majority judgment. When this failed, he did say that an invasion was in violation of the UN Charter, but he didn’t do this with the passion that he has expressed on Palestinian suicide bombers and he couldn’t even say it in straightforward language. His March 11, 2003 statement was that an invasion “would not be in conformity with the Charter.” 

With the invasion, he didn’t resign at his failure to prevent a very major violation of the UN Charter and the carrying out of the “supreme crime.” Subsequently, he accepted the occupation and helped legitimize it, supporting the resolutions (including Res. 1546 of June 8, 2004) that gave the United States and its coalition of aggressors UN Security Council sanction to stay, pacify, and rule as long as deemed necessary (in contrast with the UN’s clear insistence in 1990-91 that the aggressor Iraq get out of the invaded and occupied Kuwait and pay damages for its attack). The murderous assault on Fallujah was never once officially condemned by Annan whose mealy-mouthed remarks on the subject featured the threat such an assault would pose to the forthcoming elections and that “The threat or actual use of force not only risks deepening the sense of alienation of certain communities, but would also reinforce perceptions among the Iraqi population of a continued military occupation” (Maggie Farley, “U.N.’s Annan Seeks to Prevent an Assault on Fallouja,” Los Angeles Times , November 5, 2004). Gosh, we wouldn’t want the Iraqis to think they are an occupied country.  

He has not assailed the open U.S. threat to commit armed aggression against Iran, Syria, and North Korea and it is likely that if and when these occur he will quietly say that they are “not in conformity” with the UN Charter before helping to ram through a Security Council recognition of the aggression-occupation “facts on the ground.” 

Kofi Annan has come up with a series of reforms of the UN designed to make it more useful to education, development, poverty alleviation, and the conquest of disease, and suggesting political changes to better enable it to deal with terrorism and war. Unfortunately, his proposals and fence straddling are ultimately unconvincing and unlikely to accomplish anything useful, for two main reasons. First because it is the United States and its allies whose funding and resources are needed for development and humanitarian issues, and the United States is moving away from bolstering UN finances and cooperating with the UN on anything the Bush administration does not positively favor. Second, the main global problem of war- and terrorism-prevention is the inability of the “international community” to constrain the United States, which in the past half dozen years has carried out three major illegal aggressions in violation of the UN Charter. Kofi Annan’s reform proposals, which still rely heavily on Security Council action, do not even suggest removing the veto from the initial five permanent members, hence will do nothing even formally to prevent a U.S. veto from stalemating any Security Council action impeding its war-making and aggressions. Annan’s reforms won’t be implemented and won’t work anyway, but this rests ultimately on the absence thus far of any serious international community resistance to a superpower out of control and posing a global threat at many levels and in many spheres. 

In the fall of 2004, Kofi Annan was invited to Richard Holbrooke’s apartment in New York City to meet with a number of U.S. power brokers to hear what they had to say about the need for reform at the UN (Warren Hoge, “Secret Meeting, Clear Mission: ‘Rescue’ U.N.,” New York Times , January 3, 2005). Annan reportedly listened and said nothing at the meeting. “In the week after the session, Mr. Annan sought and obtained a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, the nominee for secretary of state. United Nations officials said afterward that it was an encouraging meeting.” The Bolton appointment followed soon after this encouraging meeting, so any moves toward a “larger freedom” through the work of the UN seems unlikely. In fact, we may soon see a further test of Annan’s willingness to serve in the interest of a “shrinking freedom” and more preventive warfare.