ACCRA, Ghana — Kofi Annan, the soft-spoken diplomat who served as the first United Nations secretary-general from sub-Saharan Africa and died Aug. 18 in Switzerland at 80 after a short illness, was laid to rest Thursday in Ghana.
Annan was one of Ghana’s prominent public figures, and his death triggered an outpouring of grief in the West African nation. More than 6,000 mourners attended his funeral at an auditorium in the capital, Accra, and many more gathered outside the venue where traditional drummers and dancers paid tribute.
The service and his burial mark the end of Annan’s three-day state funeral, with citizens, diplomats and traditional leaders filing past his casket on Tuesday and Wednesday to bid him farewell.
“He brought considerable renown to our country by his position and by his conduct and comportment,” President Nana-Akufo Addo told mourners, who included U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and African leaders such as Liberian President George Weah and Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara. “He gave his life to make peace where there was conflict, to defending the voiceless who were powerless, to promote virtue where there was evil.”
Annan devoted almost his entire working life to the U.N., steering the organization through multiple wars in the Middle East, the breakup of former Yugoslavia and a raft of other crises over a career that spanned more than five decades.
He was the co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, along with the U.N., to recognize “work for a better organized and more peaceful world.” His opposition to the Iraq War in 2003 endeared him to anti-war groups and drew sharp criticism from U.S. conservatives, including John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who became national security adviser to President Donald Trump.
Although broadly admired as a bureaucratic reformer and quiet insider, Annan was often described as being ineffective. He was criticized for his handling of U.N. peacekeeping operations at the time of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 and the killing of Muslims from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica the following year. His reputation was tainted further by a corruption scandal that touched his family and a failure to help resolve the Syrian crisis in 2012, when it was in its infancy.
Nonetheless, Annan maintained his stature in world diplomacy and in 2016 was appointed to head a U.N. commission to investigate the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.
