As United Nations staffers railed yesterday against outsiders calling for the resignation of Secretary-General Annan, senior management tried to mend fences with the staff union, which is still up in arms about an internal investigation some of them considered a “whitewash.”

Mr. Annan’s chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, and the undersecretary-general for management, Catherine Bertini, met with three representatives of the staff union including its president Rosemarie Waters, in what both sides said was an attempt to “clear the air.”

At issue was an investigation into allegations of abuse of power, including violations of hiring rules and sexual harassment, by the head of the U.N.’s own internal investigating organ, Dileep Nair. Last month an investigation by Ms. Bertini exonerated Mr. Nair of any wrongdoing.

Although the investigation was launched in response to a letter by the staff union, no union members were even consulted by Ms. Bertini, who waited six months before addressing the allegations. Ms. Bertini yesterday told the union representatives that she was ready to listen to them now, according to a participant.

“The dialogue that did not happen before is happening now,” Mr. Annan’s spokesman Fred Eckhard told The New York Sun after the meeting. One participant who asked not to be named said that while some matters were cleared up, others remained.

At the same time, a group of New York-based staffers circulated an email petition of support for Mr. Annan, and for what they termed his “balanced, fair, and substantive approach.”

The petition, broadcast on the internal mass e-mail system for Turtle Bay’s 8,000 staffers, has already received the backing of nearly 3,000 of them, according to one of the organizers of the campaign, deputy U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi.

Mr. Fawzi, who was the chief spokesman for Mr. Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Ghali, told the Sun that some concerned staffers came to him with the initiative, and that he helped write the petition’s text.

The petition rails against “vociferous attacks and accusations leveled at the Organization and its integrity.” It accuses critics of making allegations “without full knowledge of the facts,” calls accusations “unfounded,” and says they “verge on the hysterical.”

The campaign came on a day when Senator Coleman, a Republican of Minnesota, became the first high-profile Capitol Hill figure to call for Mr. Annan’s resignation. Yesterday the State Department expressed guarded praise for Mr. Annan, but refused to denounce Mr. Coleman and his call for resignation.