Factfile
Occupation: Secretary General of the United Nations.
Age: 59.
Nationality: Ghanaian.
Why in the news: Is in Baghdad in last-minute effort to avoid a US-led military attack on Iraq.
In Baghdad this weekend Kofi Annan faces his biggest political test since his appointment as UN Secretary General in late 1996. The outcome of his talks with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will determine whether the US will lead the largest military assault on Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.
However, Annan, a mild-mannered, softly-spoken career bureaucrat, has carefully laid the groundwork in a way that minimises the risk to his and the UN's reputation.
If he succeeds, then he and the UN will receive huge credit for reversing what seemed like an inexorable slide to war. Should he fail, it will be seen as resulting from a failure of UN member-states to accept a climbdown offered to them, rather than a failure of his own diplomacy.
Annan has not released details of the proposal he will put to Saddam Hussein. But it is understood to allow for the inspection of all sites by UN personnel seeking to find and destroy chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that may be in Saddam's hands.
At the same time it involves setting up a special team involving diplomats as well as inspectors, appointed by him, to inspect presidential residences.
As well as the inspections proposal, there is an improved oil-for-food deal for Iraq. The UN Security Council is considering a resolution allowing Iraq sell oil worth £3.3 billion over the next six months - more than double the present ceiling - to buy food and humanitarian supplies.
To have a package to bring to Baghdad with the unanimous approval of the UN Security Council members is a considerable achievement given the division among the permanent members between the US and Britain on one side and France, Russia and China on the other over whether military force should be used.
The UN could do with the major credibility it would get from a diplomatic success in Baghdad. The organisation is still almost broke, largely a result of poor relations with the US Congress.
Annan is largely blameless for the UN's predicament. In just over a year he has made major efforts to resolve two of the UN's main problems: its bureaucracy and its poor relations with the US Congress.
It was ostensibly the need for UN reform that prompted the US to engineer the dumping of the previous UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and his replacement by Annan. For many years the US Congress has withheld more than $1 billion from the UN, on the grounds that it is a bloated, overspending organisation.
Annan was supposed to change all that, and he delivered on his side of the bargain. Last year he produced the UN's first negative growth budget, together with staff cuts of 10 per cent.
And then the US Congress decided not to pay its arrears anyway. "Annan delivered much of the American and western agenda on reform and then got kicked in the teeth," says one long-time UN observer.
Just as he has high moral ground on UN reform, Annan's reputation has also been unsullied by the UN's peacekeeping disasters. He ran the UN peacekeeping department from 1993, and therefore presided over the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, which did not protect Bosnia; the US-dominated UN force that went to Somalia on a failed nation-building exercise; and the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, 10 of whose troops were killed in April 1994 in a failed attempt to protect Rwanda's prime minister and most of the remainder were pulled out as the genocide got into full swing.
Kofi Annan watched these debacles with intense frustration. His problem, then and now, is that the UN is only as strong as its member-states choose to make it. If the member-states, through the UN Security Council, choose to send toothless forces to regions of war and genocide, there is little he or the UN bureaucracy can do.
Kofi Annan emerged from such appalling failures with dignity. He made it clear he was only an official, and offered no defence of the member-states that made the decisions.
In late 1995, it was Annan who represented the UN Secretary General in Sarajevo where the UN handed over its failed peacekeeping mission to NATO after the Dayton accord. "The world cannot claim ignorance of what those who live here have endured," he said that day with candour.
"In looking back we should all recall how we responded to the escalating horrors of the last four years. And, as we do, there are questions which each of us must ask: What did I do? Could I have done more? Did I let my prejudice, or my fear, overwhelm my reasoning? And, above all, how would I react next time?"
Annan is the first UN career official to get the top job and the first from sub-Saharan Africa. Born in 1938 to the merchant family of a traditional chief, he has spent most of his adult life outside Africa. He grew up in Ghana as the independence movement swept the African continent, but was gone by the time the new governments of the newly independent states descended into corruption and repression.
Instead Annan spent most of his time in the west. He gained an economics degree in Minnesota and a Masters in management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before working his way up the UN bureaucracy over 30 years. His first marriage to a Nigerian ended in divorce, and he is now married to a Swedish lawyer and judge, Nane Lagergren. He spends a month's holiday in Sweden each year. He has two adult children from his first marriage.
Close observers say Annan will stick closely to the offer he is bringing to Baghdad and will not be tempted to stray into opening broader negotiations on the weapons inspection issue. "He knows the job of Secretary General is more Secretary than General," says the UN observer. "And he knows that when the powers on the Security Council say they are behind you, the first thing to know is just how far."