Prize for Peace - Interview with Jonathan Mann of CNN (unofficial transcript)

Announcer: The simple dream of peace, the sprawling institution that serves it, the soft-spoken diplomat who leads the effort -- in the centennial year of the Nobel Peace Prize, the award is bestowed to the United Nations and its Secretary-General.

Unidentified participant: I call upon the peace prize laureate for 2001, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to come forward to receive the gold medal and the diploma.

Announcer: From Oslo, Norway, CNN presents the Prize for Peace, a discussion with the co-laureate of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. And now, from the site of the annual awards ceremony, CNN's Jonathan Mann.

JM: Hello, and welcome.

There are years when the choice of laureates for the Nobel Peace Prize surprise us. There are years when some of us get angry. And then sometimes, like this year, the choice seems obvious. The selection by the Norwegian Nobel Committee of the United Nations and its Secretary-General as the laureates of the Peace Prize for 2001 draws our attention back to something that's very easy to overlook: that never before in human history has there been an organization with the ideals and the enormous obligations of the United Nations.

We're going to talk about that for the next hour, talk about the work and the people of the UN.

But before we do, join me in congratulating the co-laureates of the 2001 Nobel Prize for peace: the United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

(applause)

JM: There's lots to talk about. We're going to get underway in a moment, but, before we do, let's take a look at why you and the UN were chosen.

(videotape)

JM (voice-over): When the United States began its airstrikes on Afghanistan, four members of a UN mine clearance team were among the first civilians killed. When anthrax appeared in the mail, and some feared smallpox would be next, the UN had expertise to offer. It was the World Health Organization, a UN agency, that defeated smallpox decades ago. Now that Afghanistan has to be rebuilt, the UN is involved as well, working with the disparate factions to form a new government and head off more conflict.

In one way or another, it seems like almost every problem in the world ends up at some part of the UN. In the years since it was founded, in 1945, UN efforts -- UN officials, ambassadors, and agencies -- have been chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize more than any other organization.

Why did it win again? The Nobel citation explained it as a special endorsement: "Through this first peace prize to the UN as such, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes in its centenary year to proclaim that the only negotiable route to global peace and cooperation goes by the way of the United Nations."

But it's not just the UN; Kofi Annan was honoured as well.

Donald McHenry, Fmr. US Ambassador to the UN: He's brought a new spirit to the organization. It was demoralized. He has worked with the organization in reform. He has worked with the United States and others in taking on some of the great new issues of our time. These aren't Cold War issues; these are the issues of life and death, of AIDS, of internal stability in countries where there are drastic civil wars going on. And I think he's done an excellent job in that respect.

JM: Even under Annan, the organization still manages to outrage its critics, who wonder if Syria really deserves to be on the Human Rights Commission, or sit on the Security Council, as it will in the new year.

But at the UN, that is precisely the way it's supposed to be.

Sir Brian Urquhart, Former UN Under-Secretary-General: This isn't a sort of Boy Scout organization; this is supposedly a realistic reflection of what the world is like, with warts and all. And if you don't like Syria, or you don't like this or that, or even if you don't like the United States and come from another part of the world, it's not the organization for you.

JM: But what kind of organization is it? Even through its name, the United Nations embodies enormous ambitions. Its critics see only limited success. Its critics see only limited success.

David Rieff, Author: The main thing that's been proven is that the UN is a useful subaltern institution when great powers want to use it for certain purposes. Then, it can play a very useful role, indeed an essential role. It's also become the world's welfare agency, a kind of giant alleviation machine. And there, again, it plays a very useful role.

The one role it does not play usefully is the role it was set up to play, that is as the premier peace and security institution in the world.

(end videotape)

JM: No one calls the police to report a happy family or a nice, quiet day. The United Nations is called on to address problems that even entire countries can't solve, and it gets handed new ones, it seems like almost every day.

Kofi Annan, why don't we begin our conversation with a problem that's in the news now: Afghanistan. Is the war over? Is Afghanistan going to be a peaceful normal country now?

SG: I think we have a long way to go. The war seems to be ending, but we really do not know because there's considerable instability on the ground, and we are going to need a security unit to ensure that we have the right environment to be able to continue our humanitarian assistance, to be able to reach the needy and help advise the new administration in carrying on its work. And we need stability not just to deliver assistance, but also to be able to begin thinking and acting on recovery and reconstruction. So the hard part is ahead of us.

JM: When you say security, everyone thinks of blue helmets. There's a new interim administration that will be taking up power in a little more than two weeks. Are there going to be UN peacekeepers in there by then?

SG: We hope there will be a force on the ground, but it wouldn't be UN blue helmets as such. I hope it would be a coalition of the willing, a multinational force, coming from member states of the UN with capacity who will go in there and work with the new administration to maintain peace and order, so that we can get our work done, and, of course, the population can also get around to rebuilding its life.

JM: We were talking to a former Assistant Secretary[-General] John Ruggie -- if I'm pronouncing his name right -- and he said this is just about the worst place in the world for any peacekeeping force. Are you concerned about the security of the forces that will go in? Afghanistan's not traditionally all that hospitable to outside armies.

SG: History is not on our side, and, of course, the force that goes in has to be well equipped and prepared for all eventualities. But it's going to be tough, it's going to be dangerous, and the governments who are going in must also be prepared; they must accept there will be risks. This is not a risk-free operation. But it needs to be done if we are going to be able to help the Afghans get back to their feet.

JM: There is already a new leader-designate for the interim administration, and he has said that if and when Mullah Mohammed Omar, the head of the Taliban, is found, he will be delivered to what he called international justice. Are you international justice? Is the United Nations going to put Mullah Mohammed Omar on trial?

SG: Well, I don't know what the [Security] Council will do, if we are offered Mullah Mohammad. Since we do not have an International Criminal Court yet -- and I hope that will be established in the course of next year -- or we will begin the process of establishing it, and even then, the first thing they may have to do is to add terrorism to its [inaudible] and put terrorists on trial. Since we don't have such a court, in each situation, if you look back, we've set up a special court -- for Bosnia, for Rwanda -- we are talking of one for Cambodia and possibly one for Sierra Leone -- so there are legal issues which will have to be dealt with. It is also quite conceivable that he could be tried in a member state.

JM: Let me interrupt and ask you about that, because one member state, in particular, would be very happy to try him. The United States is searching for him, searching and intensifying its search now for Osama bin Laden. How would you feel -- how do you think the nations of the world would feel -- to see Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden tried by a U.S. military tribunal, perhaps in secret, perhaps with -- or almost certainly, if it's a tribunal, with U.S. soldiers sitting as his judges, with his ability to appeal not inside of a court system, but going through the Secretary of Defence to the President of the United States? Would that look like justice to the world?

SG: As you know this proposal has raised lots of questions, not least in the United States itself, where people are asking questions. I do realize and accept that when a nation has gone through the sort of trauma and the crisis that we saw after 11 September, almost a loss of innocence for the American people, there is a sense to do something about it, assure the security and safety of the population. But the United States is also a nation of laws, and one of the most exemplary nations when it comes to checks and balances in the judiciary, and this has raised questions.

My own judgment, or my sense, is that if one is going to err, one should err on the side of liberty and freedom because, in effect, the question is how much liberty and freedom do you give up for security and safety? And if you do give up liberty and freedom for security and safety, do you in the end have security? It's a tough issue.

JM: We're going to talk more about it in a moment. We have to take a break. But September 11th hangs very heavily in the air. When we come back, we're going to talk more about an old problem that's taken on very new dimensions. Stay with us.

(commercial break)

JM: Welcome back to Oslo. The United States wants to lead the world in a war against terrorism. In Washington, there are estimates that 40 or 50 or 60 countries may have terrorists at work in their midst.

Kofi Annan, the fight against terrorism, the threat to national security, is number one on the U.S. national agenda, number one on the list of priorities of the Bush administration. Let me ask you about your agenda, about the world's agenda. When you look at problems like preventable diseases, when you look at diseases like AIDS, when you look at poverty, or famine, or the lack of access to clean drinking water or medical care, where does it sit on your agenda?

SG: Obviously, on 11 September, there was tremendous solidarity with the United States, and I think it's been sustained since then. I could tell the atmosphere and the feeling in the UN building. The attack was on the United States, but the question was where could it be next? It could have been anywhere. And of course, the members of the organization rallied very promptly in support, and also to take action, against terrorism. And since then, there has been lots of focus on terrorism.

But the old problems, the old problems that existed on 10 September, before the attack, are still with us: elimination of poverty, the fight against HIV/AIDS, the question of environment and ensuring that we stop exploiting the resources of the Earth the way we are doing, and beginning to think of the future and the planet we are going to leave to our children and their children. All these issues, the issue of good governance, are with us, and I think we need to focus on them as well, because if we do not focus on them, it will not be long before we realize that people in other regions are beginning to lose interest. If we do not show interest in issues of concern to them and their problems, they are going to be losing interest in issues which are number one in Washington's agenda. It is important to them, but there are other pressing things for them as well.

JM: The agenda of the United States, though, began with a war in Afghanistan. It may not end there, unless the Security Council -- you were informed of this officially in recent days -- members of the administration have been musing very publicly about attacks on Iraq, attacks on North Korea. In fact, depending on who you're listening to, the list goes on to include different countries. Do you see any pressing threat that would require military action to be resolved in either of those places, or anywhere else?

SG: Let me start by adding that I think Washington is realizing that they need to tackle some of the other issues -- poverty, conflict and all this -- and there's heightened interest in moving forward on some of these issues.

Regarding your specific question about attacks on Iraq and other countries, as I've had occasion to say many times, I think it would be unwise, and I should not advise it. I would hope that this will not be imminent, because I have not seen or known anyone to share any evidence that links Iraq to the attack on 11 September. One may argue that it need not necessarily be linked to an attack on 11 September. There may be other reasons.

But I think we need to consider the situation in the entire Middle East. We already have very serious tensions between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and I don't think one would want to destabilize that region any further. We should focus our energies on what is happening in Afghanistan and in trying to pull the Israelis and the Palestinians from the brink and try and get them back to the table.

JM: You've already warned me that you keep private conversations private, but I'm going to ask you anyway: You saw President Bush in the closing days of November; did this come up, and did you offer that suggestion?

SG: I have had discussions with the senior officials in Washington, and they know my view, and I've also had a chance to speak publicly on this. My own sense is that responsible officials in Washington understand that this is not the time to do this.

JM: OK, we're going to take another break now. When we come back, we're going to talk about a slightly different subject, about personally and professionally, how Kofi Annan put his imprint on the UN organization. Stay with us.

(commercial break)

(video clip)

Elmo, of "Sesame Street": Can Elmo win the Nobel Peace Prize too?

SG: If you make lots of peace, and you work hard, and you get people to love each other, you will get a big Nobel Peace Prize.

Elmo: How long will that take? Two days? (laughter; end video clip)

JM: That's a side of you we don't see often see.

Welcome back to Oslo.

You're a serious man, you do a serious job; I'd love to talk more about Sesame Street. But instead, we're going to talk about the United Nations. CNN's Richard Roth, our correspondent there, has a look at why you've been so successful with the organization.

(videotape)

RR (voice-over): Kofi Annan was a company man at the United Nations, spending 33 years moving up through the system. Son of a Ghanaian chief, Kofi Annan is now leader of the world -- a compassionate diplomat in an often-cruel world.

Madeleine Albright, Former US Secretary of State: I thought that he was somebody that was destined to be a leader at the United Nations.

RR: His U.S. admirer helped Annan win the top post, blocking predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali from a second term. Knowing how the UN bureaucracy worked, and often didn't work, Annan realized he had to do more than rearrange the seats inside the General Assembly.

John Ruggie, Former Adviser to SG Annan: He invited me down shortly after he was elected and said, I need to have somebody in my office who isn't going to be swallowed up by the cable traffic and the in box, and would you be willing to help me strategize?

RR: He brought together the alphabet soup of UN agencies and held them more accountable. He opened up the government-heavy UN to a partnership with the private business sector, and just plain opened up the UN as the people's house.

Outside, Mr. Annan went to Washington to heal a valuable connection that was quickly deteriorating.

Richard Holbrooke, Former US Ambassador to the UN: His first and greatest achievement was to build a close relationship with Congress and to rebuild American confidence in the organization.

RR: Annan has championed the right of the UN to intervene for human rights and to pressure drug companies on developing AIDS drugs.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK Ambassador to the UN: This man is not a politician. He's a UN servant, become a politician in taking on this job, and done it with his own characteristic - a very quiet, un-arrogant, unemphatic style. And I think that appeals to people tremendously.

RR: But how far does niceness go? In the end, will the United Nations' 189 member states make a more meaningful commitment to Annan's ambitious goals and principles?

Ed Luck, Columbia University: That's a test that's going to be coming up in the next five-year term, and we have yet to see whether, in fact, that's a test and a hurdle that he can pass.

(videotape ends)

JM: I want to talk about policy, but first I want to talk about you as a person because you are, without a doubt, the most famous person in the world that no one knows anything about. We know that you are married, we know that you have children, but beyond that, we see you behind a podium and we see you at work, and we get the impression that you must live behind a box with the flag of the United Nations on it.

Let me ask you, first of all, about your free time, about what you do when you're not being Secretary-General?

SG: Well, Nane and I, my wife, we like walking, so we hike. We go hiking holidays. We walk in Central Park and around the streets on weekends. And we read, we take pictures, we play tennis when we can, and we laugh a lot, at ourselves and at situations.

JM: You know, it's so funny that you talk about walking, and about hiking, and about reading -- very quiet activities. You are an extremely quiet man, quintessentially diplomatic, and I'm curious about whether you are that way really, whether you are the quiet guy that we see, or whether you are professionally and completely under control because your position demands it.

SG: I don't think anyone can be professionally and constantly under control for that long. Something will have to give or something will explode. No, I'm by nature quiet. And I also look around me. I talk to people. I try to understand what is happening. Don't get me wrong, I do get angry like everybody else.

JM: I'm told you're even quieter when you're angry.

SG: That is correct [laughter]

That is correct. When I'm angry, and I'm really upset, I go very quiet, and when there's lots of activity and excitement around me, I go even calmer and quieter, because somebody has to stay calm to be able to steer things right, and so, as the captain of the ship, I cannot afford to lose my head or become wrapped up into all this. And so I feel it, I know what is going on, and I carry on.

JM: Let me ask you about your job now. You have spent years trying to cultivate the United States, trying to bring it back fully into the United Nations family, trying to bring back some of its money into the United Nations coffers, and you've been successful.

SG: ...our money.

JM: You've been successful, but the timing of the success is particular. This has taken a long time. You were expecting, I think, $580 million. That was voted, if I've got my facts right, within two weeks of the September 11 attacks, and now the United Nations has discovered that it's going to get three times as much money as it was even expecting. Once again, correct my math if I'm wrong.

You waited for the United States and the new administration to confirm its Ambassador to the United Nations, and that languished in the Senate for months. Three days after September 11, the United States sent you an Ambassador.

Do you get a sense that the United States regards the United Nations almost like a player on a playing field, and you were pushed off the field because they didn't think they needed you to win, and now that they're in a difficult patch, they're bringing you on for the rest of the game, or for this portion of the game.

Do you get quiet when you think about that?

SG: Yes, I get quiet, but I keep pressing. I don't give up. I had expected the money to be paid much sooner than that. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, when he was Representative at the UN, focussed lots of attention this, working with other member states to craft a deal which was acceptable to all member states, and this went to the wire. In fact, he gave me a call just about four thirty, five o'clock in the morning, when it looked as if the deal would break down. We made some calls. I went to the General Assembly and joined them, and we got the deal. And I thought we would have received a check early in the year. In fairness to President Bush, he did assure me from the beginning that he's going to make sure the U.S. debt is paid. And in fact, a couple of months later, when I spoke to him and I said, 'Mr. President, thank you for what you are doing to get the money paid, we could use it', he said, 'Don't thank me -- we owe you. We owe you and we ought to pay.' This was around March or April.

Of course, things accelerated after the 11 September attack. The new ambassador came in. The checks began rolling in. And you're right - they did not only pay the arrears on the peacekeeping budget, but they also paid what they owed on the regular budget. So we got a substantial amount of money into the organization. The bulk of it will go back to the countries who offer troops, the troop-contributing countries, and we have owed them for years. Some are very poor, so the money will go back to them. But what is important is that the U.S. is back in the fray, is back in the fold of the family, and I think the important thing is to keep them there and for them to work with us.

If one thing has been realized is that since 11 September, everyone realizes -- and, I think, including Washington -- that there are issues today that no one country, however powerful, can resolve alone.

JM: I'm going to cut you off there. I apologize. We'll be back in just a moment.

(commercial break)

JM: Welcome back. This is going to be awkward. A great many people have gathered here to honour the United Nations and the Secretary-General, but we can't look closely at the UN and overlook what happened in Rwanda in 1994 - a genocide that the world and the UN, it should be said, essentially watched unfold, without raising a hand.

(videotape begins)

JM (voice-over): Rwanda was supposed to be on its way to peace in 1993, after an agreement between its Hutu-dominated government and Tutsi rebels. Peacekeepers were deployed to oversee it. But there seemed to be no great enthusiasm within the UN for the mission; 23 Pakistanis and 18 Americans had died that year, on another mission, in Somalia. The UN went into Rwanda determined to avoid a similar disaster. What it got is incomparably worse.

The Canadian general who led the peacekeepers communicated his fears in a message that reached Kofi Annan, then Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations.

Philip Gourevitch, Journalist:: It said, Listen, I've got this informant here who's very highly placed, and he's telling me that he's training men to kill Tutsis. He's registering every Tutsi in the greater area of Kigali. He's caching weapons. Weapons are being acquired. And the famous parts of his fax are, he says he believes it is for their extermination, the extermination of Tutsis.

JM: Three months later, that's what happened: weeks of undisguised mass murder witnessed by UN peacekeepers under orders not to intervene. Belgium had peacekeepers in Rwanda, but withdrew them, fearing for the soldiers' safety.

The Secretary-General at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, began looking for someone -- for anyone -- to send in more soldiers. But the country best equipped to do it -- the United States -- refused and pushed for the very opposite: to have all of the peacekeepers withdrawn. The Security Council essentially agreed and voted to cut the mission to just 270 men.

A month later, it reversed itself and authorized thousands more men, but 600,000, perhaps 1 million, people were killed by the time French troops eventually went in.

[videotape of swearing in of Kofi Annan as Secretary-General]

JM: In 1997, Kofi Annan became UN Secretary-General. He commissioned an internal study to find out how the world body let the genocide happen. The report blamed just about everyone in the organization.

Ingvar Carlsson, Inquiry Chairman: There is one overriding failure which explains why the UN could not stop or prevent the genocide, and that is a lack of resources and a lack of will.

JM: At a time when the UN had 17 peacekeeping missions in place and 70,000 people deployed around the world, it seemed Rwanda hadn't mattered enough. The day the report was released, Annan apologized, both for himself and his organization.

(videotape ends)

You apologized, you moved on. Do you still carry it with you?

SG: I think it's difficult to forget what happened. It's difficult not to have hoped that we could have done more, but you can only deploy what you had. In fact, when the crisis hit, we had 200 soldiers on the ground, 200 soldiers in Rwanda, and they were in Kigali, and the genocide was all over the country. And we couldn't get additional troops to go in. And when you look at the number of people who died, both there and what happened in Srebrenica, you search for ways to try and strengthen our institutions and systems: to synthesize governments, to develop the political will, so that we try to avoid at least such incidents in the future.

JM: Can I ask you about your own feelings at the time? Did you ever think of resigning - publicly resigning -- to draw attention or -- you were the head of peacekeeping -- to atone?

SG: I think I would have stepped down if I had thought it would have solved the problem. I don't think my resignation was the issue, and I think we heard former Prime Minister Carlsson on this. I personally spoke to 80 countries. When you refer to the Secretary-General trying to get troops, I met 80 countries, pleading and begging to give us troops to go in.

Would it have been better for me to resign or stay on and fight and try to improve things and try and ensure that tomorrow this is not repeated? I chose the latter, but that's for you to judge.

JM: Madeleine Albright, who we saw in that report, liked to call the United States "the indispensable nation." If the United States had answered that call -- it had the logistics, it had the troops, it had the planes -- it would have been the country to turn to. If the United States alone had been willing to answer your call, do you think you would have saved a lot of those people?

SG: The UN and myself would have saved lots of those people. And in fact, you notice all the ambassadors, everybody, said they had their orders, orders not to intervene, orders from capitals. I'm the only one who's supposed not to have orders. I'm the only one who's supposed not to have bosses -- and I work for them.

JM: How much has what happened stained the UN? How much does it stain the Nobel Peace Prize that you've just received?

SG: I think it was a difficult period for the UN, and I think it's going to take us a while to live it down. On the other hand, I think we need to keep hope alive, we need to strive to do better. We need to strive to make sure that tomorrow, if we confront this sort of an operation, the organization is ready.

At the end of World War II, we said never again. Yet we've seen it twice since World War II -- or three times, if you count Cambodia.

JM: And yet those things are history. Rwanda isn't quite history because there's an international war crimes tribunal at work, a UN tribunal...

SG: That's correct.

JM: ...that it would seem -- is a disaster. It was established seven years ago. It's had four years of trials. I think maybe a dozen verdicts have come in - correct me if I've got the math wrong -- $90 million a year, staff of 800, moving slowly, slowly -- so slowly that one wonders if justice is being done. And every step of the way it seems there are scandals. Like they found out recently that some of their paid investigators were, in fact, war crime suspects, men wanted for genocide, in the employ of the tribunal itself.

SG: I don't think the Tribunal went out of its way to employ criminals. Some may have slipped through the cracks. And they have really tried to clean up. But let me also set the record straight that these tribunals are very complex. They are [inaudible]. You set it up, you go through all sorts of linguistic barriers to get it done. Yes, they haven't convicted as many people as one would expect in national courts, which is sometimes easier and much more cohesive. But when you look in history, in all these kinds of tribunals, in Nuremberg, you don't get mass convictions. You go for the leaders, set an example, send a message that impunity would not be allowed to stand. Ideally, if some of the governments concerned had good courts at home -- national courts -- some of these cases would have been transferred to the national courts, with international tribunals focusing on the leaders and the key people. It's time consuming, and it is not a mass-sort of a trial approach. In fact, the history of Nuremberg will confirm this, and other trials of this nature.

We are trying to improve the situation. In fact, several ad hoc chambers have been opened, both in the case of the tribunal for Yugoslavia, and we are looking at that for Rwanda, so that many more chambers could sit at the same time and accelerate the process.

JM: We'll be back in a moment.

(commercial break)

JM: Welcome back.

We're in the final weeks of Kofi Annan's first term as Secretary-General. His next -- his second -- term begins on January 1.

Your biggest problems are probably already on your desk: Afghanistan, nation-building, some of the things we've talked about.

Let's talk about some of the other things because, what happens is we get a sense that the United Nations is there when there's an emergency on the front page. And I think part of what the work you've done is to try and draw our attention to the stories that are on the back page.

Let me ask you about your priorities. There was, first of all, the discussion - and this is looking far ahead -- that it might be possible to help the poorest people in the world by reducing, I think -- tell me if the numbers are right here -- by the year 2015, the number of people who are living on $1 per day.

SG: By 50 percent.

JM: Yes.

SG: By 50 percent, and that will require that we all work together. That will require a substantial increase in overseas development assistance. It will require more effective action on debt relief. It will require the governments of the recipient countries to do something about corruption, to strengthen their institutions, set up regulatory systems -- and we are working with them -- and find ways and means of also attracting investments and bringing in companies that have the management, the technology, to work with them.

And the heads of states and government who met at the Millennium Summit committed themselves to working together to ensure that we achieve that objective. The other one was to stop the spread of AIDS and really take effective action to treat those who are infected, to search for a vaccine, and to avoid the [mother-to-child] transmission, which is a the cruellest of it all.

JM: How many people live on less than $1 a day now?

SG: On less than $1 a day you have about a billion.

JM: One billion?

SG: Yes, and less than $2 per day, you are talking about 2 billion to 3 billion people, on less than $2 per day.

JM: Now that goal was set for 15 years hence. The last thing I saw from the United Nations is that's not even going to be possible.

SG: That is not going to be possible unless you manage to get in substantial assistance and also lift the growth levels in all these countries to about 5 percent a year. And we have given the member states a road map, and I'm going to give them an annual report each year indicating how well we are doing, where we are succeeding, where we have fallen behind, and why.

JM: This brings us to Afghanistan, in an odd way. You began a very moving speech -- your Nobel lecture today -- with reference to what the world owes to an Afghan girl, that the rest of it really can be measured in what we deliver to an Afghan girl. The United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, had the idea that the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan has to end and that women have to be not only treated fairly, they have to be represented in government. And just a short time ago, I think at a meeting in Brussels, she and the European Union's Social Affairs Commissioner set the standard that if there isn't fair representation in government, if there aren't rights for women, that aid should be withheld.

Let me ask you about that, the idea of linking aid to a country that's in the midst of a famine, emerging from 23 years of war, and trying to tie that to the measurements you have set - one Afghan girl and the opportunities she can expect.

SG: That statement is not the policy of the UN, nor my policy.

JM: Is it a good policy?

SG: I wouldn't say that it's a policy I would subscribe to, but let me put it this way: If you condition assistance to a whole population on that kind of criteria, you are probably likely to compound the problem and make it worse. We are trying to get the Afghan leaders to bring in women into positions of leadership. At the Bonn Conference, we've managed to get five of them there, and we're going to work hard on them to bring in more.

The decision is theirs. It is the Afghans who are going to run Afghanistan. We can encourage them, we can cajole, we can convince, we can persuade -- we cannot impose decisions on them. And if because they are not doing something that we think they should do we're going to punish the whole population, then we also become complacent in the suffering the population has had over these years.

On our own staff, we are going to recruit lots of women. In fact, recently, we recruited 2,200 women to do a census for us in Kabul, or the World Food Programme did.. We have women on our staff. We had some very moving scenes where the High Commissioner for Refugees received seven women who have not been able to work for five years because the Taliban said women cannot work. After the Taliban fell, they suddenly appeared in the office and said, 'We are back, we are here, we're coming back to work.' And we put them to work. And they were as excited as we were to have them back.

And in our own recruitment, we are going to set example by recruiting quite a lot of Afghan women, and we will press the Afghan leaders to follow our example. But beyond that, the decisions are theirs, and I would hope we would not condition our efforts, in that we need to engage them, we need to work with them, we need to convince them. And I think of a time when the Afghan women who in the past had played a role will come to play an important role again, and I think all the aid donors are going to push for effective participation in Afghanistan life by women.

JM: We'll take a break. We're going to talk more in a moment.

(commercial break)

JM: Welcome back. We have just a few moments. I want to ask this question, because we've been talking about other peoples' problems that end up on your desk, and we've been talking about your plans. How much of your job are you in charge of, and to what extent is your job in charge of you? Do you come in in the morning knowing what you're going to do, or do you come in with a stack of problems that have arisen overnight and just try to work through the first 1 or 2 inches before the day is done?

SG: You usually I go in in the morning with an idea of exactly what you want to do, and you usually have an idea of the issues on your desk or that you're juggling at that particular time. But what you do not know is what is going to develop next. Take the 11th of September. We had breakfast, and I told my wife, I told Nane, I should be going. And as I was walking out of the door, a call came through. It was a call from the UN security saying 'stay home, there has been an accident, and we will let you know when to come to the office.'

I went to the office later. But then we saw what had happened. And the whole organization got mobilized to respond to this. So for the next couple of days or a week, everything else was on the back burner, for the Security Council and for the General Assembly, but there were people in other parts of the world who were waiting for decisions on some other crises that we had to carry on with as well.

And so, as much as you would want to control your day -- and by and large, one could, but there are events that you cannot control -- unexpected things happen, and they push everything else out for awhile.

JM: Let me ask you about something you've probably thought about, or maybe you can think about now, for us: $1 million -- or nearly $1 million has been awarded to you and to the United Nations. You get half of it. Where's your half going?

SG: What we've decided to do is to pool the money and do one big project. We have also some ideas that I'm going to discuss with the President of the General Assembly and decide, ideas from helping children of those who've lost their lives in cause of peace, or a lecture series that will help the UN and the community think of emerging issues and how we should prepare to respond. And there are other ideas, but when the member states and their Ambassadors came to me and said, 'Great, we are all Nobel laureates,' I said, 'Yes, you are, but we will keep the money for the benefit of the organization.'

JM: I envisioned 189 countries arguing over this on the Security Council floor. That's why I was going to ask.

SG: No, no, I think we are going to keep it in a single pool, and I think we will try to find a very simple process of decision-making. I will consult with some of the key chairmen of the committees, and then we'll go ahead and do that.

JM: Kofi Annan, thank you very much.

Let me ask you to congratulate a remarkable man, a remarkable organization: the United Nations and its Secretary-General, laureates of the Nobel Prize for Peace for the year 2001.

(applause) *****