UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was approved unanimously by the 15-member Security Council on Wednesday for a second term as the world's top diplomat.
The 189-member General Assembly ends the election procedure with a vote scheduled for Friday.
The re-election of Annan, a 63-year-old Ghanaian who spent decades as a U.N. official, has been a forgone conclusion since he announced in March he would be a candidate for a second-five year term. His post expires on December 31 and no candidate had opposed him.
``The Security Council as a gesture of its recognition of the very excellent work that Secretary-General Kofi Annan has done has decided months ahead to recommend him for a second term,'' said Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh, the current council president.
``We regard his first term as a marvelous epitome of what a secretary general should do with this organization and how he should lead it,'' British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock told reporters.
Annan's re-election this week is far cry from the contentious battles five years ago when the United States vetoed an African, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, for a second term, complaining he did not do enough for U.N. reform.
NO SERIOUS OPPOSITION
Several ballots were then held until Annan received the nod from the Security Council, whose five permanent members -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China-- have veto power. This year all five endorsed him early in the year, with President Bush being the first to do so.
Traditionally, the secretary-general's post rotates every five years by region and in theory it was Asia's turn this year. But once Annan announced his candidacy, no serious candidate ran against him, giving the Africa region an unprecedented 15 years in the world body's top post.
China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Yingfan, said many Asian nations believed it was their turn and he hoped an Asian would be considered in five years.
But he said the council's unanimous decision showed its appreciation for Annan's efforts to promote the United Nations in world affairs.
Annan became the seventh U.N. secretary-general on Jan. 1, 1997, a time when Washington mounted a major attack on the world body, accusing its bureaucracy as stifling and its peacekeeping operations as too expensive.
He was head of peacekeeping in 1993 -- presiding over the department's worst moments during the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda. But rarely was he blamed for the disasters. He commissioned major reports on what went wrong in both countries and apologized on behalf of the United Nations.
A member of a merchant family from the Fante ethnic group and married to a Swedish artist and lawyer, Annan's first years in office were marked by a struggle to get Washington to pay its heavy debt to the world body.
That was nearly resolved late last year when the U.N. General Assembly agreed to cut U.S. payments.
This year Annan has made the struggle against AIDS his ''personal priority.'' The vote in the Security Council comes at the end of a three-day high level conference to combat the disease.
He was born a twin, the third of five children on April 8, 1938. He spent his early childhood in Bekwai, near Kumasi, the inland capital of the pre-colonial Ashanti empire.
Educated at the University of Science and Technology in Kimas, he received a bachelor's degree from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a masters in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
