Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has died at age 93.
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Egypt’s state-run Ahram Online reported that he died Tuesday in a hospital in the Egyptian city of Giza, where he’d been admitted days earlier after breaking his leg. He worked to establish the U.N.’s independence, particularly from the United States, at a time when the world body was increasingly called on to step into crises with peacekeeping forces, with limited resources.
He was criticised for the UN’s failure to act during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and for not pushing hard enough for United Nations intervention to end Angola’s civil war in the 1990s, which was at the time one of the longest running conflicts in the world.
Statement from Dr. Nelu Burcea, United Nations Liaison for the Seventh-day Adventist world church, regarding the death of Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Boutros-Ghali as the first Secretary General from Africa, also became the first to be denied a second term.
Indirectly, Boutros-Ghali said the United States was arrogant and compared its attitude to that of ancient Rome.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described Boutros-Ghali as a respected statesman and scholar of global law who brought “formidable experience and intellectual power” to the top UN job.
It promptly held a minute’s silence in tribute to its former chief, a Coptic Christian who became the UN’s first Arab secretary-general, and the first from Africa.
In many ways, Boutros-Ghali was born into the world of diplomacy, Egyptian politics and all the dangers both of those entail. He was the first secretary-general in the post-Cold War era and at a time when it was taking on more global peacekeeping work, operations that often were criticized for doing too much or too little.
Over four decades, Boutros-Ghali participated in numerous meetings dealing with global law, human rights, economic and social development, decolonization, the Middle East question, worldwide humanitarian law, the rights of ethnic and other minorities, non-alignment, development in the Mediterranean region and Afro-Arab cooperation.
Boutros-Ghali blamed slowness in reform on the lack of money and pointed out that the United States was $1.4 billion behind on payments.
Before serving at the United Nations, he had occupied the post of Egypt’s deputy prime minister for foreign affairs, among other positions.
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Boutros-Ghali’s relations with the incoming Clinton administration were soured nearly from the start in 1993 by foreign policy differences, political infighting and frictions between him and secretary of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright, who was Washington’s representative at the United Nations before succeeding Christopher at the State Department.
