Kofi Annan, former United Nations secretary general and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died at the age of 80.
His foundation announced in a tweet on Saturday that Annan “passed away peacefully” after a short illness on Saturday in the Swiss city of Bern. It did not provide details but remembered him as a figure who radiated “genuine kindness, warmth, and brilliance in all he did.”
Annan, who was born in Ghana in 1938 and was one of the world’s most celebrated diplomats, was the seventh United Nations secretary general and the first black African to hold the post. He served from 1997 to 2006. He rose through the ranks for years at the UN before becoming secretary general — he was first appointed to a UN agency in 1962 at the World Health Organization. Just before becoming secretary general, Annan served as UN peacekeeping chief and a special envoy to then-Yugoslavia.
During his time at the UN, Annan oversaw both triumph and tragedy. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 for helping to revitalize the UN and as the New York Times writes crafted a new “norm of humanitarian intervention” for the organization. While he was UN peacekeeping chief, the body saw two of its greatest failures during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srberenica in 1995.
Annan was also UN secretary general during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC and when the US subsequently invaded Iraq. He called the Iraq invasion illegal.
After leaving the UN, Annan created his own foundation, based in Geneva, in 2007, and that year helped broker peace in Kenya, according to the Associated Press. He joined an elite group of former leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, called the Elders, and in 2012 was appointed as a joint envoy of the Arab League and the UN to try to help broker a settlement in Syria.
Annan is survived by his wife, Nane Lagergren, and three children, Ama, Kojo, and Nina.
