KOFI ANNAN has summoned all United Nations staff to a meeting today in an effort to shore up his crumbling leadership of the organisation.

The UN Secretary-General will address several thousand officials crammed into the General Assembly hall, where world leaders meet every autumn, and thousands more by video-link around the world.

Aides say that the embattled UN chief will deliver a “pep talk” in an attempt to buoy the spirits of UN personnel after a series of scandals, including last week’s Oil-for-Food report criticising Mr Annan and his son, Kojo.

He is expected to tout his recently released reform agenda, “In Larger Freedom”, which calls for institutional changes to revive the organisation.

Mr Annan, the first UN chief to rise up through the ranks, will find many staff angry and demoralised at what they see as the humiliation of the institution. One mid-level official told The Times that he wanted an apology from Mr Annan, but did not dare ask.

“I worked with five different Secretaries-General,” Samir Sanbar, a retired assistant Secretary-General who now writes a blog for UN staff, said. “Usually, there are ebbs and flows, but this is a very low ebb. It’s the lowest ebb. It’s ironic that this is the first ‘S-G’ whose administration has been attacked, almost boycotted, by the staff and he is the first ‘S-G’ to come from the staff.”

Mr Annan is facing scepticism about his claim that an independent inquiry into the Oil-for-Food scandal “exonerated” him. Two members of the three-member commission of inquiry have publicly challenged the UN’s spin on their report, noting that it faulted him for management lapses.

Most UN staff have still not read the inquiry’s report. Many feel that Mr Annan is being targeted by conservative critics, particularly in the United States, because he declared the war in Iraq “illegal”.

Those who had studied the report are almost universally shocked by its revelation that Iqbal Riza, then Mr Annan’s chief of staff, ordered files to be shredded one day after the Security Council approved the Oil-for-Food inquiry.

Many are struggling to understand how Mr Annan did not know that a company for which his son worked had an interest in the contract. Some question how it was that the procurement officials who awarded the UN contract did not know that Kojo Annan was linked to the company. The controversy has left Mr Annan wounded and limping towards the end of his second five-year term on December 31, 2006.

Top jobs, such as the head of the management department and the organisation’s comptroller, remain unfilled. When Mr Annan did get round to naming a new head of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the G-77 developing nations blocked him because they had not been properly consulted.

Furthermore, new scandals keep breaking out. Last week a leaked consultants’ report described a culture of favouritism, misuse of funds and sexual harassment in the UN’s election monitoring unit run by Carina Perelli, one of the organisation’s rising stars.

Mr Annan’s troubles with UN staff have been building since the death of several officials in the bombing of the UN office in Baghdad in August 2003. Louise Fréchette, Mr Annan’s Canadian deputy, offered to quit as deputy Secretary-General when an inquiry criticised security failures in the run-up to the attack. Mr Annan refused to accept her resignation.

Around the same time Mr Annan overruled another internal inquiry and took no action against Ruud Lubbers when the UN High Commissioner was found to have touched a female staff member inappropriately.

Late last year the UN Staff Council took the unprecedented step of declaring its lack of confidence in the UN senior management. In January Mr Annan brought in Mark Malloch Brown, the British head of the UN Development Programme, to try to turn things around.

He forced out Mr Lubbers and restarted an investigation into “jobs-for-favours” allegations, but the repeated reversals of Mr Annan’s earlier decisions have had the unintended result of further undermining the authority of the UN chief.

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