Kofi Annan hailed as 'conscience of the world' at burial in Ghana
Summary
ACCRA (WASHINGTON POST) - 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 on Thursday (Sept 13) in Ghana. The service and his burial mark the end of Annans three-day state funeral, with citizens, diplomats and traditional leaders filing past his casket on Tuesday and Wednesday to bid him farewell. Annan devoted almost his entire working life to the UN, steering the organisation 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. His opposition to the Iraq War in 2003 endeared him to anti-war groups and drew sharp criticism from US Conservatives, including John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN who became national security adviser to President Donald Trump. Four years after stepping down in 2008, he published a memoir in which he wrote that an atmosphere of "stultifying corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency" prompted him in 1974 to resign from a civil servant job in Ghana, which was then under military rule.