Kofi Annan

Kofi Atta Annan (born April 8, 1938)

Seventh and current Secretary-General of the United Nations

Sourced

• February 24, 1998 press conference regarding the use of force to gain compliance from Saddam Hussein - [1]
  • "You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done."
  • "he is very calm - very, very calm. Never raises his voice. Well-informed, contrary to the sense outside that he is ill-informed and isolated. And decisive."
• "Well, the issue of a standing UN army has been raised by many because, quite frankly, the way we operate today is like telling Ottawa that I know you need a fire station but we will build one when the fire breaks. We have no army. When the crisis breaks then we begin to put an army together. We go around to governments and begin asking for troops. The question with a standing UN army is that it raises issues of budget issues, legal issues, where do you place it, under what jurisdiction? And the big boys, big countries don't want it. The smaller countries are also nervous." (October 20, 2004 CBC interview)

Attributed

• "Above all else, we need a reaffirmation of political commitment at the highest levels to reducing the dangers that arise both from existing nuclear weapons and from further proliferation."
• "Business, labor and civil society organizations have skills and resources that are vital in helping to build a more robust global community."
• "Globalization is a fact of life. But I believe we have underestimated its fragility."
• "I urge the Iraqi leadership for sake of its own people... to seize this opportunity and thereby begin to end the isolation and suffering of the Iraqi people."
• "If the United Nations does not attempt to chart a course for the world's people in the first decades of the new millennium, who will?"
• "Iraq has a new opportunity to comply with all these relevant resolutions of the Security Council."
• "It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity."
• "Many African leaders refuse to send their troops on peace keeping missions abroad because they probably need their armies to intimidate their own populations."
• "More countries have understood that women's equality is a prerequisite for development."
• "National markets are held together by shared values and confidence in certain minimum standards. But in the new global market, people do not yet have that confidence."
• "Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world."
• "The Lord had the wonderful advantage of being able to work alone."
• "The question is the morning after. What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing? What happens in the region? What impact could it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed."
• "We cannot wait for governments to do it all. Globalization operates on Internet time. Governments tend to be slow moving by nature, because they have to build political support for every step."
• "We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems, if only we can find the political will."
• "We have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face."
• "We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race."
• "We must ensure that the global market is embedded in broadly shared values and practices that reflect global social needs, and that all the world's people share the benefits of globalization."

About

• "We not only have confidence in him, we support him fully. He is in a very difficult job under very difficult circumstances, but we continue to have hope that he is doing his best. We only want his senior management to exhibit the transparency and accountability that he has proscribed for the organization." [2] -- Rosemarie Waters , president of the United Nations Staff Union
• "We in Europe hold Kofi Annan in high esteem and recognise his unstinting efforts in the cause of peace and democracy." -- Jacques Chirac
• "We are not suggesting or pushing for the resignation of the secretary-general. We have worked well with him in the past and look forward to working with him for some time in the future." [3] -- United States ambassador John Danforth
• "Both Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea (the United Nations), Is this because the secretary general of the United Nations (Ghanaian Kofi Annan) is now a black man? They never did that when secretary generals were white." -- Nelson Mandela