Diary – 24 January 2013

Kofi Annan has just been in town for an evening organised by The Spectator. The 800 seats at the Cadogan Hall could have been sold twice over; the former UN Secretary General has a huge following. Having known and admired him since Bosnia in 1993, I was very pleased to be his interlocutor. He has just published a fine memoir, Interventions. This deals with involvements such as the UN’s fight against HIV/AIDS — in which he gives President George W. Bush high marks — as well as the UN’s sometimes controversial military interventions as peacekeepers. He is candid about his own and the UN’s failures, particularly in Bosnia and Rwanda. But he still retains faith in the organisation. Softly spoken, deft and courteous, Annan has dealt for decades with monsters — he has been called ‘the world’s envoy to the dark side’. Most recently he tried — and failed — to resolve the civil war in Syria. The future there looks truly awful: whereas Iraq imploded into Sunni-Shia mass murdering after the fall of Saddam, similar violence in Syria now risks exploding into the region, damaging Lebanon, Jordan and perhaps Israel. In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, given soon after 9/11, Annan said that the world had entered the 21st century ‘through a gate of fire’. That fire, fuelled by Sunni and Shia terrorism, continues to rage in many parts of the world — as the appalling mass murder carried out by Islamist militants in southern Algeria showed yet again. David Cameron is quite right to say that the struggle against this horror will last for decades. Islamist mass murder (in which most of the victims are other Muslims) cannot be contained; it must be fought. That cannot be done by the United Nations — US leadership is essential.

Two great friends have died recently.