UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Terrorism and conflicts across the Middle East will be major global issues in 2006, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said at a year-end news conference on Wednesday and he also lashed out at the media for its coverage of the oil-for-food program.
Annan said he faced getting tough management reform proposals through the U.N. General Assembly and trying to solve the ongoing conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But he said he expected terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the Middle East -- the slayings in Lebanon, the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict and the turmoil in Iraq -- to be "a major issue for us."
The usually unruffled U.N. chief castigated what he called unfair media coverage of his role and that of his son's in the now-defunct U.N. oil-for-food humanitarian program in Iraq.
He scolded James Bone of the Times of London for saying, "Your own version of events don't really make sense."
Annan responded: "I think you're being very cheeky. Listen James Bone, you've been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving and please let's move on to a serious subject."
The president of the U.N. Correspondents Association said that Bone had a right to ask a question.
Annan said not enough weight was given to bribes and oil smuggling outside of the $64 billion program, recently documented by a U.N.-established inquiry, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
'WE ALL HAVE TO BE CAREFUL'
"We all have to be careful, whatever responsibilities we have, not to be fed by people with agendas."
Asked again if he bought a Mercedes tax-free for his son, Kojo, with his diplomatic discount, Annan said, "I know you are all obsessed about the car. If you want to know more about it, please address yourself to my son or his lawyer."
"I am neither his spokesman or his lawyer," he said. "The report of Paul Volcker is clear. I am not going to rehash it."
Annan, whose second five-year term ends in December 2006, had some advice for the man or woman who will succeed him.
"They need a thick skin. They need a sense of humor, and they should laugh a lot inside and outside and at themselves ... and be able to reach out and work effectively with leaders across the world," Annan said.
Asked about his regrets, Annan said he was sorry he was not able to avert the war in Iraq in 2003.
"If I go back in recent years, one thing I would have liked to see ... is for us to have done everything that we could have done to avoid a war in Iraq that has brought such division within this organization and the international community," Annan said.
"And that is one thing that I must say still haunts me and bothers me that, as an organization, as an international community, we were not able to do."
Annan also said he hoped the U.N.'s biennial budget, now in contention, would be adopted by the end of the year, or the world body would face a financial crisis.
He spoke in favor of revamping the 15-member U.N. Security Council, another proposal that has run into resistance from U.N. members, and the necessity to form a new human rights council and abolish the discredited 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
