Independent UN chief who clashed with US

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who as died aged 93, led the United Nations during a period that began with high hopes as the cold war ended but failed to cope with genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia and ended in angry recriminations with Washington.

A generation before violent protests boiled over in Cairo in 2011, Boutros-Ghali was a key figure in Egypt's diplomatic old guard, a senior minister to President Hosni Mubarak and to his murdered predecessor, Anwar Sadat.

He seemed to meet the tests of character and experience when, in 1992, he became the sixth secretary general of the United Nations, the first African and the first Arab to hold the post.

The scion of a politically active Coptic Christian family, at home in a Bedouin’s tent or a presidential palace, he accompanied Sadat on his historic olive-branch mission to Jerusalem in 1977, then played a pivotal role in the Camp David accords.

He was at the White House when Sadat, prime minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Jimmy Carter signed the 1979 treaty ending a 31-year state of war between Egypt and Israel.

Strong-willed and, independent, Boutros-Ghali took the helm determined to subdue aggression and pursue peace after the fall of Soviet communism and a relaxation of the east-west tensions that had long hamstrung the UN. He also resolved to attack the organisation’s bloated bureaucracy and chronic money problems. Daunting tasks But he faced daunting tasks. Civil wars in Somalia and the secessionist states of Yugoslavia had already begun. Murderous conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis were hurtling toward genocide in Rwanda.

At the same time, 60,000 UN peacekeepers were already thinly posted in a dozen trouble spots, including Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola and Mozambique.

Boutros-Ghali’s relations with the incoming Clinton administration were soured almost from the start in 1993 by foreign policy differences, political infighting and frictions between him and secretary of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, who was Washington’s representative at the UN before succeeding Christopher at the state department. American directions In a 1999 memoir, Boutros-Ghali said the Americans had told him where not to travel, whom to avoid meeting and what to say and not say in speeches; also to avoid ruffling President Clinton, whom he regarded as thin-skinned and indecisive, and to stay away from Congress and soft-pedal talk of America’s $1.3 billion debt to the UN.

Even more than money, the UN needed US support for peacekeeping operations. But Boutros-Ghali said he had often been rebuffed when he tried to see the president and other officials to discuss what he called an “utterly confused” US foreign policy.

America, like most other member states, tragically refrained from assisting a small, overwhelmed force of UN peacekeepers when Rwanda descended into genocidal slaughter and rape in 1994.

Estimates varied widely, but the Rwandan government said 1.17 million people had been killed in 100 days. Clinton, years later, apologised for US inaction.

Boutros-Ghali's frustration over the Clinton administration's pattern of voting for tough UN Security Council resolutions and then refusing to support actions on the ground had its paradigm in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia that raged from 1992 to 1995. The Security Council deplored the violence, but its peacekeepers in Bosnia were wholly inadequate to subdue the fighting. Aside from some air strikes against Serbs, the United States also did not substantively intervene militarily, although the Bosnian conflict was eventually mediated by the Clinton administration.

Late in 1996, the security council voted overwhelmingly to give Boutros-Ghali another term. But Albright cast a decisive veto as one of the five permanent council members.

Boutros-Ghali, in a farewell rebuke, chided member states for failing to deal with disasters in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia. “The concept of peacekeeping was turned on its head,” he said, “and worsened by the serious gap between mandates and resources.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born in Cairo in 1922. His father had been finance minister. His grandfather, a prime minister under the British, was assassinated in 1910. He earned a law degree from Cairo University in 1946 and a doctorate in international law from the University of Paris in 1949. He was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University in 1954-55. For many years he was a professor at Cairo University. Foreign minister In 1977, when Anwar Sadat decided to go to Jerusalem, his foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, resigned in protest, reflecting opposition to the peace overture in Egypt and in the Arab world. In his place, Sadat named Boutros-Ghali.

He had never held office, but was known to support peaceful coexistence with Israel, while Sadat regarded his Coptic origins, reputation for fairness and marriage to an Alexandrian Jew, Leia Nadler, as potential assets in Jerusalem. Boutros-Ghali joined the Mubarak government after Sadat’s assassination in 1981, focusing on foreign affairs.

Besides pressing Israel to withdraw from occupied territories, he helped settle political and ecological disputes in Africa and in 1990 helped negotiate the release of Nelson Mandela,

After his UN term, he was secretary general of La Francophonie, the organisation of French-speaking countries, from 1997 to 2002. He is survived by his widow, Leia.