Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali Dies, Aged 93

The Security Council held a one-minute moment of silence Tuesday after his death was announced by Venezuela’s U.N. Ambassador Rafael Ramirez, the current council president, Reuters reports.

His tenure at the United Nations, during the turbulent post-Cold War years, was made even more challenging by the shifting alliances and the changing power dynamics of a newly fragmented worldwide community. A committee member at the Arab Socialist Union for three decades, Boutros-Ghali also got involved in politics through Egypt’s National Democratic Party, including winning a seat in Parliament in 1987.

“His commitment to the United Nations – its mission and its staff – was unmistakable, and the mark he has left on the organisation is indelible”, Ban said.

Born in Egypt in 1922, Boutros-Ghali was a member of a prominent Coptic Christian family.

Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian politician and diplomat, was the sixth secretary-general of the United Nations overall and he served from January 1992 to December 1996.

As the first post-Cold War secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali could be blunt and nearly undiplomatic in dealing with critics and assessing the state of the world.

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Boutros-Ghali opened the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), known as the Earth Summit, on 3 June 1992.

The Clinton administration chafed at Boutros-Ghali’s leadership through the early 1990s as the disastrous Battle of Mogadishu and the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia put USA foreign policy in the spotlight.

Boutros-Ghali had a long association with worldwide affairs as a diplomat, jurist, scholar and widely published author.

In 1977, when Sadat chose to go to Jerusalem, his foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, resigned in protest, reflecting opposition to the overture in Egypt’s dominant Muslim majority and in the Arab world.

As the United Nations’ first secretary-general from Africa, Boutros-Ghali associated himself with the starvation in Somalia and organised the first massive UN relief operation in the Horn of Africa nation.

Boutros-Ghhali died Tuesday at a Cairo hospital, Egypt’s state news agency said.

Affable and charismatic, Boutros-Ghali also became a cultural fixture, name-checked in Seinfeld, and a capable participant in an extremely memorable interview about world diplomacy with Ali G, Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego. Boutros-Ghali as he was celebrated for other things he also was criticized over his failure to manage the crisis in Rwanda and Bosnia when the genocide took place.

Boutros-Ghali headed the United Nations as the body was redefining itself. “Nobody is interested in the poor countries in Africa or anywhere in the world”.

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.