Kofi Annan Dies: UN's First African Leader and Nobel Laureate

Kofi Annan served as UN Secretary-General during some of its most contested years: the aftermath of Rwanda, the bombing of Kosovo, the US invasion of Iraq, the Oil-for-Food scandal. He was the first Secretary-General to rise from within the UN system itself rather than being appointed as an outside figure. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. He said later that Rwanda, where the UN failed to prevent the genocide while his office managed peacekeeping operations, was the failure he carried. He died in Bern in 2018 at 80. Annan was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1938, and educated at Macalester College in Minnesota, the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and MIT's Sloan School of Management. He joined the UN system in 1962 and spent his career in the bureaucracy, rising through the World Health Organization, the refugee agency, and the peacekeeping department. As head of UN peacekeeping during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, his department received repeated warnings of planned mass killings but failed to reinforce the small peacekeeping force on the ground or sound adequate alarms. Approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days. Annan became Secretary-General in 1997, and his tenure was marked by efforts to reform the institution and reassert its relevance. He championed the Millennium Development Goals, which set targets for reducing poverty, disease, and inequality worldwide. The Iraq crisis of 2003, when the United States invaded without Security Council authorization, placed Annan in an impossible position: he declared the invasion illegal under international law, angering the Bush administration while earning praise from much of the world. The Oil-for-Food scandal, in which UN officials were found to have profited from Iraq's humanitarian program, damaged both the institution and Annan's personal credibility during his final years in office.