Man in the Middle.

The trip would take Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) and a Nobel Peace laureate, first to Vienna for a meeting with Iraqi officials and then to Africa, where he would visit four nations in eight days to continue his particular brand of relentless yet soft-spoken diplomacy. Annan, 64, has been with the U.N. for 40 years, but unlike many career bureaucrats, he doesn't shrink from trouble and is said to grow calmer as a crisis mounts. He has represented the world body in international and civil conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor and other areas, and he oversaw the U.N.'s 70,000 peacekeeping troops and civilian workers from 1993 to 1996. Annan was born into a prominent family in Kumasi, Ghana, a British colony from 1874 to 1957, where his father, Henry Annan, managed a Lever Brothers subsidiary that exported cocoa before working for the British as governor of Ashanti Province. South Africa is the continent's main success story. Its transformation over the past decade from a racist, undemocratic, oppressive state to a multiethnic democracy dominated by an African majority has been remarkably smooth.