Former UN head Boutros Boutros-Ghali dead

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who led the United Nations as secretary general in the 1990s, died on February 16 in an Egyptian hospital.

A former Egyptian foreign minister, the veteran diplomat headed the world body during one of its most hard times with crises in Somalia, Rwanda, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

The 15-member Security Council observed a minute’s silence.

“Saddened to learn” of Boutros-Ghali’s death, the pope extended his “heartfelt condolences” to Ban Ki-moon, the current head of the United Nations, with a telegram sent by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.

The Clinton White House often rebuffed Boutros-Ghali when he sought support for peacekeeping operations and when he tried to see the president and other officials to discuss what he called an “utterly confused” USA foreign policy.

The Egyptian politician and diplomat who also served as the 1st Secretary General of the ‘Organisation International de la Francophonie’ passed away on Tuesday at the age of 93.

As secretary-general opening the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, he said he hoped participants would not lose time in disputes over terminology.

He was passionate about the works of French painter Henri Matisse, whom he knew when he studied in Paris, smoked an occasional cigar and drank Scotch with water – a taste he said he acquired “after 70 years of British occupation” of Egypt.

He was the first Arab to hold the post of Secretary General and the first to be denied a second term.

“He showed courage in posing hard questions to the member states and rightly insisted on the independence of his office and of the secretariat as a whole”, Ban said.

Boutros-Ghali was born on November 14, 1922 into a Coptic Christian family in Cairo.

He accompanied Sadat on his groundbreaking trip to Jerusalem in that year, an event which both forged a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and led to Sadat’s assassination four years later.