UNITED NATIONS, June 27 (AFP) - The seventh Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has improved the organization's international image, restored its morale, and helped resolve a crisis in relations with the United States during his first five-year term.
Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations, has hailed the 63-year-old, softly spoken Ghanaian as "a historic figure" and "the best secretary general in the history of the UN, bar none."
The United States was first among the five permanent members of the Security Council to endorse Annan for a second term, on March 23.
The council approved his candidacy on Wednesday, and the General Assembly will meet Friday to ratify it.
Annan, a former head of the department of peacekeeping operations, is the first secretary general to rise through the ranks of the organisation.
He is also the first to be reappointed six months before his term expires, in contrast to the humiliation of his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, black-balled by the United States when he sought re-election.
At first, Annan was perceived as Washington's creature, but he has shown skill in steering a course between the conflicting pressures from powerful member states, notably over problems arising in the Middle East.
While the UN General Assembly has traditionally shown an anti-Israeli bias, Annan clearly has the respect of both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership.
He has distanced himself from US policy over Iraq, arguably the most divisive issue in the Security Council.
He has repeatedly criticised the council's sanctions committee -- in effect the United States -- for holding up contracts under the oil-for-food programme put in place to offset the impact of sanctions on the Iraqi people.
At the same time, he won praise from the US government for strong advocacy of reform in the UN system.
The reforms helped to persuade a critical US Congress to agree to pay a large part of the United States' arrears on the UN budget.
The group of 53 African nations which urged Annan to put aside his personal reservations about seeking a second term in March, praised his "grace, dignity and concern for others".
Nowhere have those qualities been more evident than the campaign to fight HIV/AIDS, which Annan declared his personal crusade.
Several speakers at this week's UN General Assembly special session said there had been a remarkable change in the attitude of political leaders to the epidemic over the past six months. If so, Annan can claim much of the credit.
Born in Kumasi, Ghana, on April 8, 1938, Annan graduated in economics from Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, and later became a Master of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He began his career in the UN as an administrative and budget officer for the World Health Organization in Geneva in 1962, later working in Addis Ababa and in Ismailia, Egypt.
Appointed assistant secretary general for peacekeeping in March 1993, he was promoted to under secretary general in February 1994.
His tenure coincided with unprecedented growth in operations, with total deployment, at its peak in 1995, of 70,000 military and civilian personnel from 77 countries.
But that period also saw two of the UN's darkest moments.
In April 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda murdered up to 800,000 Tutsis and other Hutus in the presence of a peacekeeping force.
Fifteen months later, in July 1995, Dutch peacekeepers failed to prevent the massacre of 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the UN-designated safe haven of Srebrenica.
Annan was widely praised for commissioning two reports into the reasons for the massacres which, together with the debacle of the intervention in Somalia, caused a crisis which came close to killing peacekeeping.
The reports, released late in 1999, were surprisingly candid by the standards of an international bureaucracy, and while no individual was called to account, they did precipitate efforts to overhaul peacekeeping.
During his first term of office, Annan also presided over two unprecedented attempts at nation-building, the UN transitional administrations in East Timor and Kosovo.
Annan is married to Nane Annan, a Swedish lawyer and artist. They have three children.
