INTERVIEW-Annan says focus on poverty his biggest UN success
Source: Reuters
By Anne Richardson GENEVA, Nov 20 (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday that focusing global attention on the fight against poverty was the biggest achievement of his 10 years in the job. The war in Iraq, and particularly the death there in a bomb attack of U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello in 2003, was the low point, he told Reuters Television in a brief interview. Asked which world problem he would most like to resolve, if he could, before standing down on Dec. 31 after serving two five-year terms, the soft-spoken 68-year-old Ghanaian replied: "That is Darfur, and then help get the Middle East launched in the right direction." Some 200,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been driven from their homes in 3 years of violence in the west Sudan region of Darfur, in what the U.N. has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Annan, whose successor is Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea, was in Geneva to give a final address to the U.N. Convention on Biological Weapons, inaugurate a new building for AIDS agency UNAIDS and receive an award from the Swiss city where he was once a student. He said he had gained the most satisfaction from The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of targets agreed at a summit in 2000 that included halving global poverty and halting the spread of AIDS by 2015. "The MDGs, the fight for the poor, and the fact that we have been able to place the fight against poverty ... at the centre of international attention," he said, "because this will work for millions of people and I am extremely happy about that." "Of course I have had low moments too, the war in Iraq and particularly the way my good friends and colleagues were blown away. I lost a family that day, I lost a tribe and it was very very painful," he said. In August 2003, a massive truck bomb devastated the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people in the worst attack on a U.N. civilian complex in the United Nations' history. The dead included Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. envoy to Iraq. Annan, who won the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the United Nations, took office in 1997 as the seventh U.N. secretary-general, and the first to be elected from among the ranks of United Nations staff.
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