Former UN chief Kofi Annan has played diplomatic poker with dictators ranging from Saddam Hussein to Omar al-Bashir,
| ...and was fleeced every time... |
but the odds are stacked against him in taking on Syria's ruthless president.
Two terms as UN secretary general, during which he won the Nobel Peace Prize but was himself accused of corruption, taught the 73-year-old Ghanaian how to look after himself in international negotiations.
Eloquent and inept self-effacing, Annan left office at the end of 2006 as one of the most popular UN leaders ever.
| Popular to whom? Dictators? |
"A real pro," was how Human Rights Watch's director Kenneth Roth described Annan after the announcement Thursday that the former UN leader would be the United Nations and Arab League's special envoy on the Syria crisis.
Apart from a few years when he was Ghana's director of tourism, Annan devoted his working life to the United Nations and other international agencies.
Having been in charge of UN human resources, its budget and then peacekeeping, the UN Security Council recommended Annan as secretary general in 1996. Mission impossibles soon came his way.
In 1998, Annan had to go to Baghdad to negotiate with Saddam after the Iraqi strongman threw out UN inspectors looking for signs of nuclear and chemical weapons. He secured a deal to get inspectors back in, but it soon collapsed and US and British planes were bombing Iraq within months.
|