Credit:UN Photo / Mark Garten

By the time his tenure ends, the secretary-general would like people to acknowledge that the UN is today "a little better" than ten years ago.

Gabriela Perdomo - History will probably be the best judge of whether Kofi Annan indeed made the United Nations (UN) a better organization than it was before he accepted its leadership in December 1996. The wide consensus today—despite harsh and frequent criticism against him—is that it is. Annan will step down on Dec. 31, quite certainly amidst a standing ovation just like the one he got at the UN headquarters in New York two weeks ago as he delivered his farewell speech. On the last day of this year, diplomats and political personalities around the globe will applaud him at the same time.

The UN oversees nowadays more peacekeeping missions than ever before, it is the leader in the global fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS, promotes impressive poverty-reduction initiatives and remains active in pushing for development everywhere, from Afghanistan to Haiti to Brazil. According to several analysts, Annan transformed the UN into a much more proactive organization than it was when he replaced former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Still, this does not mean that the UN stopped being the forum where the very concepts that shape world diplomacy are discussed.

Despite his quiet and sometimes subdued personality, Annan, 68, pursued a bold approach concerning the UN's role in the 21st century, introducing new concepts that have already changed the face of international relations. Perhaps the most controversial is the doctrine known as "humanitarian intervention". At last year's general assembly, countries endorsed the "Responsibility to Protect" initiative. It entails the idea that the international community should not stand idly by when massive violations of human rights—that a particular nation is "unwilling" or "incapable" to stop—are taking place. It is certainly not a polished concept, nor an easy one to understand or implement. But it is an indisputable legacy of Annan to the world diplomacy of our time.

Intervention on humanitarian grounds was one of Annan's personal obsessions. The secretary-general worked for 30 years in the organization before 1996 and followed closely the UN's failure to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the bloodshed in the Balkans in 1995 and 1996. The Canadian commander of the UN mission in Rwanda, Roméo Dallaire, actually blames Annan for failing to approve an intervention and avoid the massacre in his book "Shake Hands with the Devil." Annan was serving at the time as undersecretary-general for peacekeeping.

Currently, the secretary-general is in favour of deploying a peacekeeping force with military capabilities in the Sudanese region of Darfur to stop ongoing, massive violations of human rights. This difficult task enjoys support from the government of the United States, but is rejected by the Sudanese administration and therefore by other nations that fear the UN could set a dangerous precedent by intervening in a country without its government's consent.

Another of Annan's obsessions was to make the UN an indispensable body for every country. He asserted repeatedly that the world faces major threats which are closely related to each other and cannot be addressed separately, but only through cooperation.

In his article "In Larger Freedom: Decision Time at the UN", published by Foreign Affairs in May 2005, he wrote: "Today's threats are deeply interconnected, and they feed off of one another. The misery of people caught in unresolved civil conflicts or of populations mired in extreme poverty, for example, may increase their attraction to terrorism. The mass rape of women that occurs too often in today's conflicts makes the spread of HIV and AIDS all the more likely (.) I do not claim that success through multilateral means is guaranteed. But I can almost guarantee that unilateral approaches will, over time, fail".

There is no doubt that Annan's ten year tenure brought valuable lessons to the organization. The UN Millennium Project for development, the Peacebuilding Commission, the Human Rights Council, among many other initiatives, will be remembered as part of his extensive legacy. His efforts to integrate civil society, private investors and non-state actors in global affairs will certainly keep enriching the UN's work and capacities for years.

It would be naïve, however, to think that Annan will emerge safe from criticism.

The Oil-for-Food program scandal that involved his son in corrupted contracts with the UN and Iraq in 2004 was a blow to his credibility, even though he was exonerated in the end. Right now, Annan is making it difficult for the UN Security Council to decide whether his successor should be a great manager or a great world diplomat. In general, Annan is indisputably considered the latter.

Still, the UN is far from being the most reputable organization in the world today. Recent polls suggest that more than 30 per cent of Americans see the UN as an anti-American bureaucratic institution; that 77.3 per cent of Lebanese have a hard time trusting the capabilities of the UN peacekeeping force in their soil, and that 70 per cent of Israelis reject their government's compliance with the ceasefire proposed by the UN in August.

Kofi Annan, Ghanaian, the first black African to be elected secretary-general of the United Nations, leaves the organization "a little better", yes, but still at a critical point.

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