Veteran Tunisian diplomat to head UN mission in Haiti

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Hedi Annabi of Tunisia, the UN assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, is to swap jobs with the Guatemalan head of the UN mission in Haiti, the United Nations said yesterday.
 
Annabi, who has been in his current post since 1997, will take over from Edmond Mulet, the chief of the UN stabilization force in Haiti (MINUSTAH) effective September 1, a UN statement said.

MINUSTAH, now comprising 7,200 troops and 1,500 police, was deployed in Haiti in June 2004 four months after then-president Jean Bertrand Aristide fled an uprising in the poorest country in the Americas.

A former Tunisian career diplomat, Annabi, 63, joined the United Nations in 1981 and has served in a series of senior posts in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) since 1993.

As head of MINUSTAH, Mulet, 56, has helped Haitian President Rene Preval restore a measure of stability and undertake key institutional reforms. Previously, he had served as his country's ambassador to the European Union and to the United States.

In a related development, Ban appointed another veteran UN official, Dmitry Titov of Russia, as assistant secretary general for Rule of Law and Security Institutions in DPKO.

The 56-year-old Titov, who served in the Russian diplomatic service before joining the UN in 1991, is a veteran of UN peacekeeping operations and led the UN team that negotiated with the Sudanese government and the African Union (AU) on joint UN-AU peacekeeping in Darfur.