U.N. Chief Gets Starring Role

Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations, visited California in part to recruit celebrities to the cause of boosting the world organization. Much to his surprise, he found himself treated as a celebrity.

Annan, on Tuesday in Los Angeles and in the Bay Area on Sunday and Monday, was hailed and stopped by passersby on the street and in hotel lobbies. Tourists in San Francisco leaned out of cable cars to snap his picture. He received standing ovations whenever he spoke.

An appearance Monday at UC Berkeley began like a pep rally, with a raucous ovation from students, before evolving into a sober discussion of foreign affairs. At USC, 10 excited international studies students snagged him in a hotel hallway Tuesday to present him with a Trojan T-shirt, acutely aware that Annan is scheduled to speak at UCLA today.

At the Bonaventure Hotel, where Annan spoke to a combined World Affairs Council and Town Hall audience of 2,200 Tuesday, he was asked to pose for a picture with a 5-week-old baby by the boy’s father. Another man went to the hotel gift shop and bought a camera so he could be photographed with the secretary-general.

During a reception Tuesday evening with film industry representatives, actor James Woods said Annan had made the U.N. relevant again. Jacqueline Bisset asked how she could help the U.N.--and was promptly given the phone number of one of Annan’s aides.

The source of this admiration clearly was Annan’s February mission to Baghdad, where, as former Secretary of State Warren Christopher put it in an introduction to an Annan speech Tuesday, “his diplomacy stopped a war that seemed unstoppable.”

But for a career international civil servant who spent more than 30 years laboring at mostly obscure diplomacy, it was a bit disconcerting, Annan acknowledged. “I’m not used to this,” he said, somewhat flustered after posing for individual photos with about 60 Town Hall and World Affairs Council board members and donors.

Maybe not. But he also seemed to enjoy it. He bantered with Earvin “Magic” Johnson before presenting the former Lakers star with a proclamation and pin naming Johnson a U.N. “messenger of peace.”

The Ghanaian-born Annan told Johnson that, while a foreign student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., he was too short to play basketball but set a school record in the 60-yard-dash. Encouraged by the football coach to go out for running back, Annan said that as a 138-pounder he discovered “as long as I could keep running I was fine, but as soon as they caught up with me, I was like a piece of paper.” He went back to track.

Johnson talked about his expanding business interests and foundation work with the young. In the public ceremony, in which he received the peace messenger designation, Johnson declared it “a blessing.” He said Annan was “an inspiration to all of us” and pledged to talk up the U.N.’s good works in his public appearances around the world.

At an evening reception organized by Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America--an event that featured more names from behind the camera than from in front of it--Annan discarded his text and talked about how the world body affects everyday life in such things as setting international air traffic rules, and how the U.N.’s universal declaration of human rights is an inspiration to those living amid repression.

Most of the questions centered on the Middle East and Baghdad. But Tony Curtis brought a little glitz to the event by showing up wearing the medal given him by the French government as a chevalier of the arts.

Buoyed by the positive reception, Annan used every appearance on the trip to urge his audiences to lobby Congress to pay some of the $1.6 billion in back dues the United States owes the world body. A bill backed by the Clinton administration to allocate more than $800 million toward the arrears has been held up by the Republican leadership in Congress.

“Technically speaking, the U.N. is bankrupt,” he told the World Affairs Council-Town Hall gathering. “The only way we have been able to keep our doors open is that our creditors have been good enough not to foreclose.”

His appeal for Congress to come through with the money got an ovation from the audience, a moment that Christopher later called “the sound bite of the day.”

Throughout the trip, Annan has only appeared before friendly audiences that are inherently interested in foreign affairs and presold on the notion of a strong U.N. He had no confrontations with critics who characterize the body as overly bureaucratic and dominated by developing nations hostile to the United States and to representative democracy.

In Los Angeles and Berkeley, his appearances were picketed by small groups of activists seeking U.N. intervention on behalf of Tibet. Asked about them, he noted that the U.N. considers Tibet part of China, and, thus, has no grounds for intervention.

But he added that he would like to see all member states, China included, uphold human rights.