Asian Angle | Remembering my guru Kofi Annan: a man of rare warmth, wit and wisdom
Those who worked with him and those whose lives he touched knew the former United Nations Secretary-General possessed a rare ingredient not always found in successful men – he was a wonderful human being
WHEN the call came from an excited colleague at 4:58am New York time on October 12, 2001, telling me the United Nations, and my boss, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, had won the Nobel Prize for Peace, I had been lying awake for nearly an hour. It was a call I had been expecting, indeed hoping for – but for three years we had heard the same rumours, and twice they had proved untrue. So it was in a mixture of anticipation and dread that I tossed and turned that night.
Kofi Annan himself, typically, had no such anxieties. He was sleeping soundly, untroubled by the prospect of either triumph or disappointment, when his spokesman woke him with the news.
“Given the sort of business we are in,” he later remarked, “usually when you get a call that early in the morning, it is something disastrous”, but it was “a wonderful way to wake up”.
There was no doubt the Nobel committee recognised the work of the thousands of unsung UN staff Annan led, striving anonymously behind the headlines – bearing the brunt of the outflow of Afghan refugees, waging the long and thankless battle to overcome poverty in Africa, fighting the scourge of HIV/Aids and other killer diseases, and patrolling the front lines in 16 peacekeeping operations around the world.
But it was also a tribute to the way the UN, under this remarkable leader, had become the one indispensable global organisation in our globalising world.
The man who brought the UN to the point of being worthy of the Nobel was unusual, first of all, for being the first to climb the ranks of the organisation from its lowest professional level to the very top. When Kofi Annan became Secretary-General at the beginning of 1997, he had not been a global figure like some previous contenders for the post; those who made it their business to follow the UN knew his résumé, but not his biography.
