Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian diplomat who led the United Nations in a chaotic 1990 tenure that began with hopes for peace after the cold war, but failed to cope with genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia and ended in angry recriminations with Washington, has died. He was 93.
His death was confirmed yesterday morning by the office of secretary general Ban Ki-moon. A generation before violent protests boiled over in Cairo in 2011, Boutros-Ghali was a keystone of Egypt’s old guard diplomacy, a senior minister to president Hosni Mubarak and to his slain 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, a breakthrough in the history of the Middle East conflict.
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 East-West tensions that had long hamstrung the United Nations. He also resolved to attack the organisation’s bloated bureaucracy and chronic money problems.
Daunting task 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. And 60,000 UN peacekeepers were already thinly posted in a dozen trouble spots, including Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola and Mozambique.
While he had said early on that he would not seek a second term as secretary general, Boutros-Ghali ran again. Late in 1996, the security council voted overwhelmingly to give him another term. But Madeleine Albright, in her last days as the US delegate to the UN, cast a decisive veto as one of the five permanent council members. Boutros-Ghali thus became the only secretary general denied a second term. – New York Times service