[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 53 (Friday, May 5, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E738-E739]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       THE REMARKABLE LEGACY OF U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL KOFI ANNAN

                                 ______
                                 

                               TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 4, 2006

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to reflect on the distinguished 
legacy of United Nations

[[Page E739]]

Secretary General Kofi Annan, a great friend of this Congress and of 
the American people, and a dear friend of our family.
  Kofi Annan began his service as Secretary General in January 1997, 
and his second five-year term will be completed in December of this 
year. Although he is the seventh individual to serve as Secretary 
General in the history of the United Nations, he is the first 
individual to be selected for this position from the ranks of U.N. 
staff.
  As the Secretary General completes his work in New York, Mr. Speaker, 
the world's luminaries will weigh in and a consensus will quickly 
emerge that Kofi Annan is the United Nations' greatest secretary 
general. Because Kofi and his wife Nanne are dear personal friends of 
my wife, Annette, and me, I want to be the first to reflect on the 
remarkable term of this outstanding international civil servant.
  Mr. Speaker, in looking back on the decade that Kofi Annan has shaped 
the United Nations, it is clear that his term has been sustained by a 
powerful vision--his belief that this complicated world body could 
become something much more than a Cold War relic useful only for 
convening meetings and servicing international conferences.
  Since Secretary General Annan's first day on the job, he has been 
driven by the conviction that the United Nations must undergo what he 
has called a ``strategic refit'' to help the organization reach its 
full potential in the 21st century, to better serve the pressing needs 
of mankind that individual states are unable or unwilling to meet.
  Every day for the last decade, Mr. Speaker, the Secretary General has 
worked tirelessly, against impossible odds, to convince 191 sovereign 
states to let him reshape the organization in line with his vision. 
This has been no small task, given that each one of these 191 states--
democracies, monarchies, military juntas, and brutal dictatorships--is 
jealous of its own sovereign rights.
  As we enter the closing months of Kofi Annan's term at the helm of 
the most important and most unruly international organization, we can 
say with absolute confidence that--against all odds--he has succeeded 
in this project.
  Mr. Speaker, perhaps the most profound measure of Kofi's success was 
the ground-breaking consensus agreement he led the United Nations to 
adopt last September at an historic summit of more than 100 heads of 
state. This agreement consisted of a binding pledge by all U.N. member 
states to recognize a collective ``responsibility to protect'' 
individuals threatened with genocide, ethnic cleansing or crimes 
against humanity, a responsibility that supercedes the sovereignty of 
any individual state.
  Kofi Annan's inspiration for his effort to reshape the fundamental 
principles underlying the United Nations grew out of his profound 
sadness in the tragic failure of the global community to protect its 
most vulnerable citizens in Srebrenica, Bosnia, and in Rwanda.
  Mr. Speaker, during the decade between the latter of these two 
tragedies and that World Summit pledge last September, Secretary 
General Annan, has focused U.N. activities on three goals: preventing 
conflict, promoting democracies, and eradicating poverty. He has done 
this methodically and with steely determination, step by step, 
surmounting numerous pitfalls and hurdles along the way.
  Despite inheriting a United Nations beset with a sclerotic 
bureaucracy and severely limited resources, Kofi Annan's achievement in 
mobilizing the world body to start to close what he has called ``the 
chasm between [those who are] rich and poor, free and fettered, 
privileged and humiliated.'' This effort has been breathtaking in scope 
and scale.
  In the past nine years under Secretary General Annan's watch, Mr. 
Speaker, the number of civilian soldiers deployed on U.N. peacekeeping 
missions has increased from 20,000 to 80,000, bringing hope and a 
measure of stability to damaged lives in places like Liberia, Burundi, 
Haiti, the Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
  U.N. capacity to move beyond simply keeping the peace to helping 
shell-shocked societies recover and prosper has also been greatly 
enhanced under Kofi Annan's leadership. His most notable accomplishment 
in this process was to establish a U.N. Peacebuilding Commission during 
that World Summit last September.
  Mr. Speaker, the Secretary General's efforts to build U.N. capacity 
to promote democracy have also enjoyed remarkable success. During his 
tenure the Secretariat's Political Office has helped conduct more than 
100 successful elections, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 
people involved in this enterprise have also helped achieve democratic 
openings in places previously thought to be beyond democracy's reach, 
such as Georgia, Ukraine, Sierra Leone and Lebanon.
  Secretary General Annan's moral leadership has also inspired the 
U.N.'s member states to remake a wholly dysfunctional U.N. Human Rights 
Commission by replacing it with a Human Rights Council that for the 
first time in the history of the United Nations will require countries 
to meet human rights qualifications to gain membership. This change 
will forever shatter the pernicious myth that had long operated in 
Geneva, that a pathological dictatorship like Sudan somehow occupied 
the same moral high ground as Sweden in enforcing agreed human rights 
standards.
  The Secretary General has also created a new architecture to attack 
poverty and chronic disease by committing states to tangible Millennium 
Development Goals, and by creating a Global Compact committing 
corporations to pledges to upgrade environmental, labor and human 
rights conditions. This will serve to bring the benefits of 
globalization to more people worldwide.
  Mr. Speaker, it was my honor to be the first person to nominate Kofi 
Annan for the Nobel Peace Prize. When the distinguished Secretary 
General accepted that prize in October 2001, he explained why he is so 
committed to ensuring that the United Nations can live up to its 
responsibility to protect each and every vulnerable human being.
  As he most eloquently phrased it on the stage in Stockholm, ``What 
begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too 
often ends with a calamity for entire nations.'' And ``a genocide 
begins with the killing of one man--not for what he has done, but 
because of who he is.''
  Mr. Speaker, it is hard to overstate the contribution that United 
Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has made to advancing human 
dignity, peace and stability in the world. I invite my colleagues to 
join me in saluting Kofi Annan, the finest Secretary General ever to 
have served at the helm of the United Nations.

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