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INDEPENDENCE - Kofi Annan, in his last major speech as UN secretary general, urged the United States today to shun go-it-alone diplomacy and collaborate on its world challenges, including the Iraq war.
In a farewell address delivered at Harry Truman's presidential library in Independence, Missouri, Annan praised the 33rd US president's legacy, and quoted Truman in cautioning that "no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others."
Truman was a strong backer of the United Nations and was president when it came into being. The presidential library said it was chosen as the site for Annan's last big speech because of Truman's role in helping found the United Nations.
Annan, who steps down at the end of the month, to be succeeded by Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea, said, "We need US leadership; we have lots of problems around the world ... and we require the natural leadership role the US played in the past and can play today."
"None of our global institutions can accomplish much when the US remains aloof. But when it is fully engaged, the sky's the limit," he said.
During his two five-year terms as UN leader, Annan has tangled often with President George W Bush's administration, particularly over the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, launched without a green light from the UN Security Council.
"When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose -- for broadly shared aims -- in accordance with broadly accepted norms," Annan said.
In response to a question about his view on a solution to ending the war in Iraq, Annan said the United States needed to work with the international community, including Iran and Syria, to foster a "sharing" of political power and oil revenues within Iraqi's Sunni and Shi'ite factions.
"If you make them responsible and pull them into work with you, I think it will be in everyone's interests," he said. "Getting Iraq right is not only in the interests of the US and the broad international community but even more so for the countries in the region."
Annan also reiterated his call for a reform of the 15-nation UN Security Council and took a dig at US opposition to a plan to add 10 seats. Washington wanted to add just Japan and a few others, arguing to do more would undermine the council's effectiveness.
Bush administration officials have argued Washington should use the United Nations only to serve its national interests.
"It is only through multilateral institutions that states can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organise those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong," Annan said.
The United States has historically been a leader in human rights, noted Annan.
"When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused," he said in an apparent reference to charges of abuse at US prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq's Abu Ghraib.
Annan praised Truman, in office from 1945 to 1953, as a model for American action in today's world.
"More than ever today Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world's peoples can face global challenges together," Annan said. "And in order to function, the system still cries out for far-sighted American leadership, in the Truman tradition."
Truman, who ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 making the United States the sole power in history to use nuclear weapons, learned from that experience that security from then on "must be collective and indivisible," Annan said.
"All civilisation is at stake, and we can save it only if all peoples join together in the task," Annan said. "You Americans did so much, in the last century, to build an effective multilateral system, with the United Nations at its heart. Do you need it less today, and does it need you less, than 60 years ago?
- REUTERS
