Former UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali dies aged 93

The Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose five years at the helm of the United Nations was marked by war in Europe and genocide and starvation in Africa, died on Tuesday at the age of 93.

“Later, in his book “Unvanquished: A US – UN Saga”, he reflected self-critically on his own performance and said that ‘The failure of the United Nations – my failure – is maybe, in retrospect, that I was not aggressive enough with the members of the Security Council”.

A handout picture provided by the UN on 16 February shows then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his office at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, New York, USA, December 11, 1996. His term was controversial, especially over the 1994 Rwandan genocide and Angolan war in the 1990s.

According to his official United Nations biography, Boutros-Ghali taught worldwide relations and law at Cairo University from 1949 to 1977, during which time he was also part of the Central Committee and Political Bureau of the Arab Socialist Union.

Boutros-Ghali was the author of a report called ‘An Agenda for Peace, ‘ an analysis on ways to strengthen United Nations capacity for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping.

Boutros-Ghali headed the United Nations as the body was redefining itself and taking on more global peacekeeping work – operations that often were criticized for doing too much or too little.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali made history two times during his tenure at the U.N. The first was in 1992 when he became the first U.N. chief from the African continent, and the second was when he became the U.N’s shortest-tenured secretary-general after his bid for a second term was vetoed by the U.S.in 1996.

The first Arab and first African to hold the leading United Nations post, Boutros-Ghali had also served as Egypt’s minister of state for foreign affairs for close to 14 years before being appointed as deputy prime minister for foreign affairs in May 1991.

After a series of clashes with the USA administration, Washington turned against Boutros-Ghali and chose to back Ghanaian Kofi Annan for the top post.

One of the hardest tasks during his term was dealing with the crisis of the Yugoslav Wars after the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.

Because of this stance Boutros-Ghali came under enormous pressure and criticism from some Member States of the UN, Mbeki said.

Aside from some airstrikes against Serbs, which the peacekeepers opposed even after Serb forces had slaughtered unarmed Muslims at Srebrenica and other cities, the United States also did not substantively intervene militarily, although the Bosnian conflict was eventually mediated by the Clinton administration.

Boutros-Ghali continued his career as secretary-general of La Francophonie, an organization of countries and regions where French is the mother tongue, from 1997 to 2002. In his final speech as secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali expressed his frustration with “the serious gap between mandates and resources”. He was educated at Cairo University and then later in Paris.