THE UNITED NATIONS “PEACEKEEPER”, HANDPICKED BY THE US INTELLIGENCE SERVICES?
by Thierry Meyssan
via Voltaire
Network
PEACE NEGOTIATOR FOR SYRIA ..... THE RIGHT CHOICE?
Although Kofi Annan’s track record at the UN is an indisputable success in
terms of management and efficiency, he has been sharply criticized for his
political shortcomings. As Secretary General, he aspired to bring the
Organization into line with the unipolar world and the globalization of U.S.
hegemony. He called into question the ideological foundations of the UN and
undermined its ability to prevent conflicts. Notwithstanding, he is today in
charge of resolving the SYRIAN crisis.
Former UN Secretary General and
Nobel Peace Prize, Kofi Annan, has
been designated by Ban Ki-moon and Nabil El Arabi as joint special envoy
to negotiate a peaceful solution to the SYRIAN crisis. With Annan’s extraordinary experience and
shiny brand image, his appointment was welcomed by all.
What does this top international
official really represent? Who propelled him to the highest-ranking positions?
What were his political choices, and what are his current commitments? These
questions are met with a discreet silence, as if his previous functions were in
themselves a guarantee of neutrality.
HANDPICKED
AND TRAINED BY THE FORD FOUNDATION AND THE CIA?
His former colleagues praise him for
his thoughtfulness, his intelligence and subtlety. A very charismatic
personality, Kofi Annan left a
strong imprint behind him because he did not behave simply as the “secretary”
of the UN, but more like its “general,” by taking initiatives that revivified
an organization that was mired in bureaucracy. All that is known and has been
repeated ad nauseam. His exceptional professional qualities earned
him the Nobel Peace Prize, although this honor in theory should have been
bestowed for personal political commitment, not a management career.
Kofi and his twin sister Efua Atta
were born on 8 April 1938, into an aristocratic family of the BRITISH colony of
the GOLD COAST. His father was the tribal chief of the Fante people and the elected governor of Asante province. Although he opposed BRITISH rule, he was a
faithful servant of the Crown. With other notables, he took part in the first
decolonization movement, but looked upon the revolutionary fervor of Kwame Nkrumah with
suspicion and anxiety.
In any event, Nkrumah’s efforts led to the independence of the country in 1957
under the name of GHANA. Kofi was
then 19 years old. Though not involved in the revolution, he became vice-president
of the new National Student Association. It was then that he was spotted by a
headhunter from the Ford Foundation
who incorporated him into a program for “young leaders.” From there, he
was invited to follow a summer course at Harvard
University. Having noticed his enthusiasm for the UNITED STATES, the Ford Foundation offered to sponsor his
complete studies, first in economics at Macalester
College in Minnesota, followed by international relations at the Graduate
Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
FORD FOUNDATION, FACED FOR US INTELLIGENCE SERVICES?
After the Second World War, the Ford Foundation, created by famous
industrialist Henry Ford, became an unofficial instrument of U.S. foreign
policy, providing a respectable facade for the activities of the CIA .
Kofi Annan’s
overseas study period (1959-1961) coincided with the most difficult years of
the AFRICAN-AMERICAN civil rights movement (the start of Martin Luther King’s Birmingham campaign). He saw it as an
extension of the decolonization he had witnessed in GHANA, but once again did not
get involved.
Impressed with Annan’s academic achievements and political discretion, his U.S.
mentors opened for him the doors of the World
Health Organization, where he landed his first job. After three years at
WHO headquarters in Geneva, he was appointed to the Economic Commission for AFRICA
based in Addis Ababa. However, not
sufficiently qualified to pursue a career at the UN, he returned to the UNITED
STATES to take up management studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1971-1972). He then
attempted a comeback in his home country as director of tourism development,
but found himself perpetually at odds with the military government of General Acheampong; he gave up and
returned to the United Nations in 1976.
A
SUCCESSFUL CAREER DESPITE TRAGIC FAILURES
There, he held various positions,
initially within UNEF II (the peacekeeping emergency force established to
supervise the cease fire between EGYPT and ISRAEL at the end of the October
1973 war), then as Director of personnel at the Office of the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It was at this time that he met and married
Nane Lagergren Master, his second wife. The SWEDISH lawyer is the niece of
Raoul Wallenberg, SWEDEN’S special envoy in Budapest during World War II. Wallenberg is famous for having saved
hundreds of persecuted Jews by issuing them protective passports. He also
worked for the OSS (forerunner of today’s CIA) as a liaison with the HUNGARIAN
resistance. He disappeared at the end of the war, when the SOVIETS allegedly
captured him to stem US influence in the country. In any event, Kofi Annan’s successful marriage opened
the doors that he could not have passed through on his own, especially those of
Jewish organizations.
Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar chose Kofi Annan as Assistant
Secretary-General in charge of human resources management and staff safety and
security (1987-90). With the annexation of KUWAIT by IRAQ, 900 UN employees
remained stranded in that country. Kofi
Annan was able to negotiate their release with Saddam Hussein, a feat that boosted his prestige within the
Organization. He was then successively put in charge of the budget (1990-92)
and peacekeeping operations under Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1993-96), with a brief interlude as a
special envoy for YUGOSLAVIA.
According to Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN
peacekeeping force in RWANDA, Kofi Annan
failed to respond to his many appeals and carries the primary responsibility
for UN inaction during the genocide (800,000 dead, mainly Tutsis, but also Hutu
opponents) .
A similar scenario was repeated in BOSNIA,
where 400 peacekeepers were taken hostage by BOSNIAN SERB forces. Kofi Annan remained deaf to the calls
of General Bernard Janvier and
allowed the perpetration of predictable massacres.
In late 1996, the UNITED STATES vetoed
the reappointment of the EGYPTIAN Boutros
Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General, regarded as dangerously Francophile. They succeeded in imposing
their candidate: a senior official from within the international organization
itself, Kofi Annan. Far from playing
against him, his failures in RWANDA and BOSNIA blossomed into assets after he
candidly confessed to them and promised to reform the system so that they
wouldn’t recur. He was elected on this basis and took office on 1 January 1997.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan
immediately set up an annual two-day seminar behind closed doors for fifteen UN
ambassadors. This “retreat” (sic) was generously hosted by the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund at the Pocantico Conference Center (upstate New York).
There, outside the official framework of the United Nations, the Secretary
General discussed the reform of the Organization with the representatives of
the States whose support he knew he could count on.
In this context, he reallocated the
expenditures of the UN in line with political priorities and significantly
reduced the budget of the General Secretariat. He reorganized the
administrative functioning around four objectives (peace and security, development,
economic and social affairs, humanitarian affairs). He created a post of deputy
secretary-general to stand in for him and endowed himself with a real cabinet
capable of acting promptly on the decisions of the Security Council and General
Assembly.
GLOBAL COMPACT CONCEPT – EMBRACED ONLY BY ANGLO AMERICAN
ENTITIES
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Kofi Annan’s
landmark initiative was the Global
Compact, the mobilization of civil society for a better world. On the basis
of a voluntary dialogue, businesses, unions and NGOs were brought together to
discuss and commit to respect human rights, labor standards and the
environment.
In practice, the Global Compact did not yield the
desired effect on the ground. On the contrary, it deeply distorted the nature
of the UN by playing down the power of nation-states and emphasizing that of
transnational corporations and of associations which are “non-governmental”
only in name and which are covertly funded by the great powers. By promoting
lobbies as partners of the United Nations, Kofi
Annan buried the spirit of the San Francisco Charter. It is no longer a
question of saving mankind from the scourge of war by recognizing the legal
equality of nations large and small, but of improving the human condition by
supporting the convergence between private interests.
The Global Compact is a deviation from the nearly universally accepted
logic that international law serves the common good, to a logic embraced only
by the ANGLO-AMERICANS for whom the common good is a chimera and good
governance consists in bringing together the largest number of special
interests. Ultimately, the Global
Compact has had the same effect as the charity galas in the U.S.: to give
oneself a good conscience by launching high-profile initiatives while condoning
structural injustices.
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY (NED) AN AGENCY THAT AIMS
TO CARRY FORWARD SUBVERSIVE ACTIONS OF US INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
In that sense, the terms of Kofi Annan (1997-2006) reflect the reality
of the historical period, that of a unipolar world subjected to the
globalization of U.S. hegemony at the expense of nation-states and the peoples
that they represent.
This strategy is in line with the
device set up by Washington in the 1980’s involving the National Endowment for Democracy, an agency that, contrary to its
title, aims to carry forward the subversive action of the CIA by manipulating
the democratic process. The NED
subsidizes, legally or not, employers’ organizations, labor unions and associations
of all kinds. In return, the beneficiaries participate in the Global Compact,
thereby bending the positions of the Nation-States which lack the means to fund
their own lobbies. Peace has stopped being a concern for the UN since the
unipolar world has its own policeman, the U.S.; thus the organization can
concentrate instead on absorbing all forms of protest to better corroborate the
global disorder and justify the progressive global expansion of U.S. hegemony.
The soothing rhetoric of Kofi Annan reached its zenith at the Millennium Summit. 147 heads of state
and government pledged to eradicate poverty and solve major health problems
worldwide, including AIDS, in fifteen years. Universal happiness can dispense
with political reform, provided everyone makes an effort and chips in. Why
didn’t anyone think of this earlier? But alas, the Millennium remained wishful
thinking; injustice was not eradicated and continues to nurture war and misery.
In the same vein, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 20 September 1999 speech
to the General Assembly outlined what has been termed the “Annan doctrine.”
Using his own impotence in RWANDA and BOSNIA as an excuse, he argued that in
both cases the States had failed in their duty to protect their own people. He
therefore concluded that the sovereignty of States, guiding principle of the UN
Charter, constitutes an obstacle to human rights protection. The AFRICAN Union
adopted this view under the name of “Responsibility to Protect;” the UN
followed suit in 2005 during the World Summit responsible for the follow-up of
the Millennium Summit. The Annan doctrine is nothing more than the
reincarnation of the right to intervene invoked by the BRITISH to wage war
against the OTTOMAN EMPIRE and, more recently, updated by Bernard Kouchner. The
new concept has been used explicitly for the first time to legalize the colonial
operation against LIBYA .
“OIL-FOR-FOOD” PROGRAME, BECAME AN INSTRUMENT IN THE HANDS
OF THE USA AND THE UK TO BLEED IRAQ
In addition, Kofi Annan’s terms as UN Secretary-General were marked by the
“Oil-for-Food” programme which was devised by the Security Council in 1991, but
was effective only from 1996 to 2003. It was originally intended to ensure that
IRAQ’S oil revenues would be used exclusively to meet the needs of the IRAQI
people and not to finance new military adventures. However, in the context of
the international embargo and under the personal supervision of Kofi Annan, this program became an
instrument in the hands of the U.S. and the UK to bleed IRAQ while they
occupied the “no-fly zone” (which
corresponds roughly to the current autonomous KURDISTAN region) until the
outbreak of the aggression against and destruction of the country. For years,
the population was undernourished and deprived of life-saving medicines.
Several international officials who were in charge of that program qualified it
as a “war crime” and even resigned after refusing to apply it. Among them, the
UN Assistant Secretary-General Hans von
Sponeck and UN Humanitarian Coordinator Denis Halliday considered that this program brought about the
genocide of 1, 5 million IRAQIS, including at least 500,000 children.
It was not until the invasion and
destruction of IRAQ that Kofi Annan
finally rebelled and denounced those who had paid for his education, propelled
his rise to Secretary-General of the UN, and awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize. He described the
attack on IRAQ as illegal and voiced public concern that this precedent would
eviscerate International Law Washington responded brutally with a spying
operation against Kofi Annan, his
cabinet, his family and even against his friends. The Secretary-General’s son, Kojo Annan, was accused of embezzling
“oil for food” program funds with his father’s blessing. The prosecution did
not manage to convince UN member states and, on the contrary, consolidated the
authority of the Secretary-General However, during the last two years of his
mandate, Kofi Annan was paralyzed
and forced to toe the line.
BACK
TO SQUARE ONE
After 10 years as Secretary-General,
Kofi Annan continued his career in
several more or less private foundations.
In December 2007, elections in KENYA
degenerated into conflict. President Mwai
Kibaki appeared to have defeated the candidate backed by Washington, Raila Odinga, reportedly a cousin of
then-Senator Barack Obama. U.S.
Senator John McCain challenged the
election results and called for revolution as waves of anonymous SMS
exacerbated inter-ethnic differences. Within days, riots left more than 1,000
dead and 300,000 displaced. Madeleine
Albright proposed the mediation of the Oslo Center for Peace and Human
Rights. The institute sent two mediators: former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and former UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, both
members of the Board of Administration.
As a result of that “mediation,”
President Kibaki was forced to bow
to U.S. wishes. He was able to stay in office, but first had to accept a
constitutional reform that stripped him of his powers in favor of the Prime
Minister and to agree to the choice of Odinga as Prime Minister. In his role as
wise old African, Kofi Annan helped
to give a veneer of legitimacy to a regime change imposed by Washington.
Kofi Annan
currently exercises two key responsibilities. First, he chairs the Africa Progress Panel, an organization
created by Tony Blair after the G8
summit held in Gleeneagles for the purpose of ensuring media coverage of the
actions of the BRITISH Ministry of Cooperation (DFID). Unfortunately, like the
Millennium Summit, the G8 promises were not fulfilled and the activity of the AFRICA
Progress Panel is negligible.
SOLVING THE FOOD PROBLEMS OF THE BLACK CONTINENT THROUGH
BIOTECHNOLOGY
He also serves as chair of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in AFRICA
(AGRA), which aims to solve the food problems of the black continent through
biotechnology. In fact, AGRA is a lobby funded by the Bill Gates and Rockefeller
Foundations to promote the dissemination of GMO’s produced by Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta and
others. Most independent experts agree that, beyond the issue of their
environmental impact, the use of non-reproductible GMO crops keeps farmers
under the thumb of their suppliers and introduces a new form of human
exploitation.
Regarding Monsanto See also:
KOFI
ANNAN IN SYRIA
So what has this former high-ranking
international official come to SYRIA for? In the first place, his appointment
suggests that the current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, whose image has been tarnished by his kowtowing to the
UNITED STATES and by a string of corruption scandals was not up to the
task, while Kofi Annan, despite his
balance sheet, still enjoys a positive image.
Secondly, a mediator can succeed
only to the extent that he has been selected by the parts in the conflict. But
this is not the case. Kofi Annan
represents the Secretary-General of the UN and his Arab League counterpart. He defends the honor and reputation of
both institutions in the absence of clear political instructions.
If the appointment of Mr Annan was approved de facto by
the members of the Security Council and those of the Arab League, it is because it satisfies conflicting expectations.
For some, the joint special envoy is not intended to broker peace, but to clad
a peace that has already been negotiated between the great powers so that
everyone can stand tall. Others expect him to repeat the KENYAN script and
bring about regime change without further violence.
DEMAND BY SAUDI ARABI AND QATAR VIA KOFI ANNAN: PRESIDENT
AL-ASSAD SHOULD STEP DOWN BECAUSE HE IS AN ALAWITE AND THAT POWER BE
TRANSFERRED TO THE VICE PRESIDENT FOR BEING A SUNNI
Over the past months, the action of Kofi Annan has been to present his own
plan, an amended version of the one developed by RUSSIAN Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In doing so, he has
rendered the plan palatable for Washington and its allies. In addition, Mr.
Annan has intentionally introduced an element of confusion by suggesting that
he had convinced President al-Assad
to appoint one of his vice presidents, Farouk
al-Shara, to negotiate with the opposition.
This is portrayed as a
concession made by SYRIA to the GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL. In fact, Vice
President al-Shara has been in
charge of these negotiations for a year and the demand made by SAUDI ARABIA and
QATAR is totally different: that President al-Assad should step down because he is an Alawite and that power be transferred to the Vice President for
being a Sunni. It would thus seem
that the joint special envoy is engineering a way out for those states that
have attacked SYRIA and invented the fable of a democratic revolution crushed
in blood.
However, the doublespeak of Kofi Annan, who when in Damascus
was satisfied with his meeting with President al-Assad but expressed
disappointed once back in Geneva, has not raised any questions about his true
intentions.
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