Tunisian head of UN mission in Haiti grappled with country’s many woes

UN mission head grappled with Haiti’s many woes

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The U.N. mission chief who is missing along with more than 100 people in the rubble of the collapsed U.N. headquarters building in Haiti is a career Tunisian diplomat who wrestled with the Caribbean nation’s grinding poverty, violence and deadly tropical storms.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy would not confirm French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s report that everyone in the U.N. building, including Hedi Annabi, appeared to have died in the earthquake that hit Haiti late Tuesday.

U.N. officials said only that Annabi, a bespectacled 65-year-old career diplomat known for his modesty, is unaccounted for.

Annabi, who joined the U.N. in 1981, has been in Haiti since September 2007 when he took over as head of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti. That posting followed a 10-year stint as assistant to the U.N. secretary general for peacekeeping operations.

Prior to joining the United Nations, Annabi served in Tunisia’s foreign service and worked as an adviser to then-Prime Minister Hedi Nouira in the 1970s. He was appointed chairman of the North African nation’s official news agency in 1979.

Annabi studied English literature at Tunis University and later graduated with a political science degree from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He also studied international relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, an unenviable distinction that has defined much of Annabi’s work in the country.

In 2008, Annabi warned that the international effort to stabilize Haiti was extremely fragile and becoming even more so because of soaring food prices and declining living standards that he blamed for deadly riots during that year.

Also in 2008, Haiti was pounded by four tropical storms that killed nearly 800 people and caused $1 billion in damage, a loss that prompted Annabi to warn the following year that Haitians will have little to eat and won’t be able to send their children to school without continuing humanitarian aid.

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Associated Press Writer Bouazza Ben Bouazza in Tunis contributed to this report.