Secret conclave tries to save UN

The group’s concern was that lapses in his leadership during the past two years had eclipsed the accomplishments of his first term in office and were threatening to undermine the two years remaining in his final term.

They began by arguing that Annan had to refresh his top management team. On Monday, he announced that Mark Malloch Brown, 51, the widely-respected head of the UN Development Programme, has become Annan’s chief of staff, replacing Iqbal Riza, who announced his retirement on December 22.

Their larger argument, according to participants, addressed two broad needs. First, they said, Annan had to repair relations with Washington, where the Bush administration and many in Congress thought he and the UN had worked actively against President Bush’s re-election.

Second, he had to restore his relationship with his own bureaucracy, where many workers said privately that his office protected high-level officials accused of misconduct.

The apartment gathering on December 5 came at the end of a year that Annan has described as the organisation’s ‘‘annus horribilis’’.

The UN faced charges of corruption in the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, evidence that blue-helmeted peacekeepers in Congo had run prostitution rings and raped women and teenage girls and formal motions of no confidence in the organisation’s senior management from staff unions.

The meeting was held in the apartment of Richard C. Holbrooke, a US ambassador to the UN under President Clinton. Others in attendance included John G. Ruggie, assistant secretary general for strategic planning from 1997 to 2001 and now a professor of international relations at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; Leslie H. Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Timothy E. Wirth, the president of the UN Foundation, based in Washington. ‘‘The intention was to keep it confidential,’’ Holbrooke said. ‘‘No one wanted to give the impression of a group of outsiders, all of them Americans, dictating what to do to a Secretary-General.’’

In a telephone interview on Sunday, Annan said he felt the session had been ‘‘supportive and helpful’’, but said it was just one of many such meetings he had been holding. —New York Times