3 - African Prophet or American Poodle?

Résumé

Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in A World of War by Stanley Meisler. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007, 372 pp., $14.78, ISBN: 978-0-471-78744-0
The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power by James Traub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, 442 pp., $26. ISBN: 978-0-374-18220-5

Ghana’s Kofi Annan was the first black African to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) – between 1997 and 2006 – and he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN in 2001. During his ten-year tenure, Annan courageously, but perhaps naïvely, championed the cause of ‘humanitarian intervention’. After a steep decline in the mid-1990s, peacekeeping increased again by 2005 to around 80,000 troops, with a budget of $3.2 billion. African countries like Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Ethiopia/Eritrea, and Côte d’Ivoire were the main beneficiaries. Annan also moved the UN bureaucracy from its creative inertia to embrace views and actors from outside the system: mainly civil society and the private sector...