Annan and New Year Resolutions

peace (pēs) - tranquillity; freedom from war; cessation of hostilities; harmonious relations

pacifism (pas’i-fizm) - the belief that all international disputes can be resolved by arbitration; the doctrine that all violence is unjustifiable

When the clock struck midnight on the 1^st of January, 2007, a great many people may have greeted it with an expectant half-smile. They may have listened blissfully as the chimes rang out, each seemingly pregnant with the promise of some scintillating string of novel experiences, some titillating beginning, a fresh start. Not Kofi Annan. For him, the chimes were a death-knell heralding a hearse, with his career lying stiff as a stockfish in the coffin it bore.

Oh no, Annan was not fired. It’s just procedure. He’d served his term, he’d done his bit. And for the record, Annan embodied the quintessence of the international diplomat. His two-term tenure as secretary-general was not only unprecedented but a bizarre deviation from informal UN policy, a clear indication of his popularity among peers and masterly ambassadorial adroitness. During this time he executed a monumental streamlining of the institution, waged an unrelenting war on HIV/AIDS, and spun into action the Magna Carta of human rights restoration, the Millennium Development Goals Initiative, at a pace nothing short of unabashedly admirable. Not least of all, he was jointly awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize alongside the establishment he so selflessly served, a befitting crowning glory to a distinguished diplomatic career.

Annan could not rest easy on his laurels, however. This is because, if truth be told, Annan was not rewarded for being a peace-maker, but for being a pacifist. He’d honed the habit to fervently adjure against violence with the passion of a Pentecostal preacher, to preach peace with the piety of a Pope, when all he really advocated for was passivity, and for him, conflict resolution by arms was really not a question of conscience, but of convenience. His talent for equivocation was especially evident when 1,000,000 lives were chopped down in Rwanda because as UN Under-Secretary General, Peacekeeping Operations, he allegedly advised against an armed intervention in the interests of ‘regional stability’. Until years later when the outrage was universally vilified, the official UN definition of the Tutsi massacre was not outright genocide, but ‘acts of genocide’. But if he hadn’t proven his semantic skills with Rwanda, he definitely outdid himself with Darfur, where he spent three years orchestrating elaborate round-table ‘peace’ talks while the Janjaweed methodically decimated 400,000 Darfurians in cold blood. That bloodbath, thanks to him, is till date far from over.

The picture was not complete however. The world needed a scapegoat, and in his farewell speech, Annan left us in no doubt, proceeding to give America the best diplomatic dressing-down he could muster, proclaiming the world had become less safe because of America’s incursion on Iraq. Of course, if one gauges the 57,000 body count (or 100, 000 - or 500,000 for that matter, according to certain sources) as a result of that incursion against those enumerated above as a result of ‘peaceable arbitration’, there is no doubt to the rational mind why the world is less safe today. It makes one wonder what the outcome of World War II could’ve been if the fate of Great Britain had been left to Neville Chamberlain (the pacifist) and not Winston Churchill (the ‘warmonger’). What if America had not joined the Allied forces? What could’ve happened in Yugoslavia if NATO had not intervened? What would’ve become of Liberia or Sierra Leone today if the ECOMOG forces of West Africa had relented to intervene militarily, and proposed peace talk marathons instead? One sad yet inalienable fact history has taught us is that the majority of long-running conflicts experienced in our world has been perpetuated by psychopaths and megalomaniacs, for which the cold reality of the need for peace is driven home only if borne in the image of a bullet.

And if Annan were weak on history, perhaps he should’ve recalled from his Methodist school biology lessons that violence as a response to unjustified violence should never be ruled out because the human being is of necessity so conditioned by virtue of the basic ‘fight or flight’ instinct. Not that it would be any use teaching the distinguished sexagenarian new ‘tricks’. He lost that opportunity on Dec. the 31^st. Not you, though, dear reader. So get this: whatever your well-intentioned resolutions for the New Year, be sure that some of them will brace your back to the wall. And make no mistake, each time you vacillate, each time you hesitate, each time you relent to fight back, to ‘do the right thing’ regardless of cost, a piece of you will die, until your will crumbles inexorably from the inability to bear the brunt of failure. Then it will not matter whether you live to be 68 like Annan, or even a hundred. Every passing second will sound like a death-knell to you, because inside, you’re already dead.

Evil, they say, prevails when good men fail to act. Enough said. Have a blessed one, folks.