Free Republic

HAT does retirement hold for the world's top diplomat, a man who has taken swipes at the United States, negotiated for peace in Iraq and Lebanon and tried to halt unfolding genocide in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur? If Kofi Annan's Ghanaian compatriots have their way, it will have less to do with golf and grandchildren than with politics and presidential suites. Ghana's most celebrated statesman sounded every bit the presidential candidate on his return home this week. The occasion was his first public address since stepping down last month after 10 years as secretary-general of the United Nations. Mr Annan...

Outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan traveled to the Harry Truman Library yesterday to deliver his valedictory. It was yet another sanctimonious broadside against the Bush administration. Ho hum. As Truman himself once said, in a different context: "That's plain hokum. If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em: It's an old political trick." What Truman would say today about Annan himself, and the organization he has headed for the past 10 years, can only be imagined. But it would be, in a word, colorful. Annan, who leaves office in 19 days, said he chose the Truman Library in order to pay...

(I had this piece written this morning when I caught Senator Hagel of Nebraska on CBS describing Israel’s efforts to stop the Hezbollah from killing them as a “slaughter”. I felt sick to my stomach that we have such a stupid and ignorant person as a Republican senator. Where has he been for the last 58 years, or is he an anti-Semite too? We already know that he is a copperhead.) We are being inundated with pictures and news features showing innocent women and children being killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon, and we are moved to act to stop...

UN reform a disaster: Evans Emma-Kate Symons, Paris 19oct05 GARETH Evans has launched a savage attack on UN inertia, condemning the troubled organisation's botched attempt at wholesale reform in its 60th year as a depressing disaster. The former Australian foreign minister is now head of the International Crisis Group and a UN insider who recently missed out on the coveted post of High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. He was a member of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's high-level panel on UN reform. Though a strong supporter of the UN, Mr Evans warned that the failure to embrace the panel's reform blueprint,...

One of the mysteries shaping up in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal is, who is "KA"? Those initials appear in the memo that surfaced last week, implicating Secretary-General Annan, apparently referred to in the document as "the SG," in the lobbying process with which a Swiss-based company, Cotecna Inspections SA, in late 1998 went about obtaining a fat U.N. oil-for-food contract. It did this while employing as a consultant the secretary-general's son, Kojo Annan. If those initials, KA, refer to Kojo Annan - as an unnamed Cotecna official told the New York Times last week appears to be the case -...

So prolific in scandal has the United Nations become that it's getting hard to keep tabs. You can surf the channels, from rape by peacekeepers in the Congo, to theft at the World Meteorological Organization, to a Human Rights Commission crammed with despots; from inadequate auditing to botched management to wasted money to running the biggest heist in the history of humanitarian work--the Oil for Food program in Saddam's Iraq. An aggrieved Secretary-General Kofi Annan has chosen to describe the reporting of such outrages as "attacks on the United Nations"--as if the problem lay in the reporting, rather than the...

WASHINGTON — An Iraqi-born American citizen pleaded guilty Tuesday to several charges as part of the federal investigation into the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, becoming the first person to be convicted in the growing scandal. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the agreement with Samir Vincent, accused of being an unregistered Iraqi agent between the first and second Persian Gulf wars. [SNIP] The case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York. The criminal indictment and plea deal were filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York. [SNIP] The Justice Department said that from 1992 to...

1 April-Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today he hoped United Nations weapons inspectors would eventually return to Iraq, noting that their work had merely been suspended. Speaking to reporters upon arriving at UN Headquarters in New York, the Secretary-General said that if any weapons of mass destruction were to be found, the inspectors should go back to test them. "I hope the time will come when they will be able to do that," he added. Asked about what consequences it might have for the legitimacy of military action if such weapons are not found, the Secretary-General noted that, although the issue...