U.N. secretary-general's Nobel Peace Prize well deserved

When Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the United Nations were given the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, commentators were not very much surprised. The announcement was even deemed sweeter by the fact that the award went to the United Nations and its hard-working Ghana-born Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Sweden's Dag Hammarskjold, in 1961 as U.N. boss, posthumously received the Nobel Peace Prize; former U.N. Undersecretary-General Ralph Bunche, too, received the award.\nCharacteristically, Mr. Annan later calmly told U.N. workers that they had all won the prize to motivate them to even work harder, adding: "And who knows? If you keep at it, maybe some of you will see another Nobel Prize. If you are going to get that next Nobel Peace Prize, I think we had better go back to work."\nMr. Annan is considered gentle, with a modest candor, which makes his harsh criticisms of powerful nations be acceptable. In 1998, for example, he chided the Israelis as well as the Arab side in the Middle East conflict in Jerusalem, adding: "But I think it is important for you, my Israeli friends, to try to understand that those (Palestinian) grievances do not come out of a clear blue sky."\nSome people have wondered if Secretary-General Annan's wife's Scandinavian roots played any role in the Oslo-based Nobel Committee selecting him as well as the U.N. body for the 2001 award. Indeed, Mrs. Annan's Scandinavian roots did not, in any measure, have a part in the peace prize's choice. After all, in 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s thoroughly southern-bred wife, Coretta, did not have to be Scandinavian for her husband to receive the coveted prize. Before Mr. Annan -- as an African recipient -- there had been some other African recipients. South Africa's Sir Albert Luthuli, whose Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, titled "Let my people go," had a biblical anecdote; assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; and the respected Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also of South Africa, are just a few.\nBorn in 1938 as Kofi Atta Annan (the first name, Kofi, meaning a son born on a Friday and the middle name, Atta, also meaning a male twin in Ghana's "Akan" naming tradition), he assumed his U.N. secretary-generalship on Jan. 1, 1997. Invariably, Mr. Annan had paid his dues very well in world-wide peace operations and U.N. duties: as former U.N. assistant secretary-general for Program planning, budget and finance head, as head of human resources and security coordinator, director of budget, chief of personnel for the High Commissioner for Refugees and as administrative officer for the Ethiopia-based Economic Commission for Africa. Apart from serving actively in peace negotiations as the U.N.'s under-secretary-general under Egyptian Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, he was a key player in 1998 to get Iraq to comply with the 15-member U.N. Security Council demands, with the reported March 1998 warning of "severest consequences if Baghdad breaks the accord." He also calmly took the rap for part of the Rwanda ethnic murders and, on many occasions, he was on the scenes of conflict in the Balkans, earning praise from all and sundry.\nAs Mr. Annan accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, this fall for his beloved United Nations and himself, he would most certainly remember several astute former African U.N. diplomats before him.