Annan Wants Focus on Other Ills

Secretary-General Kofi Annan would like to talk about something other than Iraq.

In a year-end news conference, the U.N. leader lamented Thursday that the focus on that conflict had taken attention away from other major problems that cause more daily insecurity than do terrorism or unconventional weapons.

“Let’s get our priorities right in 2004,” he said. “Let’s make 2004 a year of kept promises.”

Annan called HIV/AIDS, which kills 8,000 people a day, “the real weapon of mass destruction.” He warned that Afghanistan might collapse without more international help and that insecurity in Africa would only worsen next year, especially as Iraq begins to require more money and peacekeeping troops.

Citing poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy as problems affecting the daily lives of billions of people, Annan said the world was losing ground on the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals. “And if the goals are not met,” he said, “we will all be poorer and less secure.”

But most of the questions at the news conference centered on Iraq, showing that for Annan, there is no escaping the issue. Iraq is a prism through which the U.N. will be judged: The secretary-general’s attempts to restore the world body’s relevance hinge in great part on what he does to help rebuild the country and how he deals with the U.S. in doing so.

With his typical understatement, Annan said that when it came to dealing with the U.S., “it has been a difficult year.” Each time he tried to mediate between the U.S. and Iraq before the war, it seemed, he was attacked from both sides.

After Annan helped draft Iraq’s surprise invitation late last year for the return of U.N. weapons inspectors, and when he questioned whether a U.S.-led invasion would be legal if the U.N. Security Council didn’t back it, emissaries from Washington slapped him down. When he withdrew from the deliberations, others accused him of not doing enough to stop the war.

Despite Washington’s desire not to cede control to the U.N. after the U.S.-led invasion, Annan installed a team in Iraq that worked to restore basic services and civil structures. He appointed a trusted envoy and friend, Sergio Vieira de Mello, to lead the effort. De Mello and 21 others were killed in an Aug. 19 bomb attack on the U.N.’s Baghdad headquarters.

U.N. staffers charged that Annan’s failure to dictate the terms of the organization’s involvement in Iraq had endangered the team. In November, he pulled most of the international workers out of the country, and despite pressure from Washington and the Iraqi Governing Council, he has refused to return them until security improves.

These days, Annan faces a question with no clear answer: Is it better to wait until the violence in Iraq subsides, or to send in a team to give the reconstruction process momentum? By protecting his staffers, is he betraying the Iraqi people?

Diplomats say Annan wants to wait until Iraq returns to self-rule, which U.S. and Iraqi officials hope will happen by July 1, before reestablishing a significant U.N. presence there, thus avoiding awkward negotiations with the U.S. over who would report to whom. The U.N., Annan has said, must not be subjugated to an occupier.

But he also insists he is not ruling out involvement sooner. He has invited the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council to meet with the U.N. next month to hash out what they expect of the world body and see whether it’s doable. It’s a matter of clarity, he said Thursday, shaking his finger. “Not instructions.”

Annan’s new boldness stems largely from the attacks the U.N. experienced this year -- both physical and political -- and a realization that the organization must change. Responding to criticism that he has been “more secretary than general” in his leadership, Annan vowed that in the coming year, “I will be both.”

The secretary-general, who began a second five-year term in January 2002, appointed a panel of international experts to assess how the United Nations can become a more effective arena for preventing warfare and promoting welfare. The U.N. is the organization that intervenes where no one else has an interest, he said, adding that the “forgotten humanitarian crises” seem to be multiplying.

With looming issues such as nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran, Annan said he wanted to avoid a repeat of Iraqi defiance and U.N. impotence. A high-level panel will try to clarify gray areas of international law -- such as when preemptive action is acceptable and when humanitarian intervention is legitimate.

Most of all, Annan said, the U.N. needs to draw on lessons learned when the U.S. chose to go around the divided Security Council to invade Iraq, to ensure such a move is not repeated.

The U.N. must “adapt our system and structures of peace and security to be able to deal with the kind of problem that confronted us on Iraq,” Annan said. We must “ensure that in the future we don’t go down that road again.”