Word: annans
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...Once my father did something that quite shocked me." Kofi Annan is talking. He is nestled in the back of a royal-blue Mercedes, part of a six-car motorcade flying along the streets of Accra, Ghana. Air conditioning purrs inside the car. Outside, motorcycle outriders scream past, inches from the doors, sirens singing as they race ahead. Annan shakes his head and gives the tiniest of sighs. "I asked them to skip the outriders. I asked for a nice, low-key day out." A grin. The streets are lined with men and women who become ecstatic as the cars...
...Annan continues in his quiet voice, decorated with a lively British accent. "I witnessed a scene in my father's office once which shocked me a bit. He was looking over a set of accounts. He had a question or something, so he called one of the junior managers, and of course the fellow came rushing right in. But the fellow was smoking. And he put the cigarette--still lit--into his pants pocket because my father didn't smoke and didn't approve of people who did. And he stood there as he talked to my father, with...
...Ghana, Annan's father is still revered. His name was Henry Reginald Annan--the first and middle names were a legacy of British colonialism, when ambitious Africans named their children as if they were bound for Oxford. Annan happens to be a sturdy Scottish name, and from time to time business associates believed that H.R. Annan was a Highlander--until they met him. In fact, Henry Reginald Annan was a noble of the Fante tribe. He was possessed of a legendary personal reserve. His son recalls seeing him steam up only once or twice--including the day of the cigarette...
...Annan's predecessors as U.N. Secretary-General--Kurt Waldheim, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Boutros Boutros-Ghali--were a gray parade of deliberately inoffensive floats. But Annan, in his three years on the job, has shown himself to be a brass band of hope, ideas and energy. His critics fault the slow pace of reform he has brought to the U.N. They argue that even armed with a management degree from M.I.T., he is badly overmatched by the U.N.'s thick bureaucracy. But mostly they chew away at his idealistic, moral world view. The U.N. continues to have its problems...
...What Annan proposes is nothing less than a world filled with dignified people. A world where Sierra Leonean rebels would have enough innate dignity to not chop off the arms of infant girls. A planet where India and Pakistan would be dignified enough not to blow up each other, where the indignities of chemical weapons would be a thing of the past, where the world's rich would be, yes, dignified enough to worry about the millions of Africans who will die of AIDS in the next two decades. This is the kind of world Annan imagines...