Former governor general Adrienne Clarkson is remembering her friend and ex-United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan as “a man of enormous compassion” and “intense human vulnerability.”
The first black African to lead the United Nations, Annan died at the age of 80 after a short illness, his family and foundation announced on Saturday.
The relationship between Clarkson and Annan spanned a quarter of a century and the pair served together on the board of directors for the Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa.
Those qualities, Clarkson said, included dignity, generosity, understanding, compassion and a capacity for listening that “is very rare in world leaders.”“I think that what was remarkable about Kofi Annan was that he hereditarily -- and for centuries I guess, because that’s the way African tribal life is -- was really a king and a prince in his own culture,” Clarkson said. “He brought all of the best qualities of that to his international work in the modern world for the UN.”
She added that Annan was not “a power technocrat” and that while he was realistic in his assessment of the world’s most complex problems, “he never lost hope and he never became cynical.”
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