Former UN Secretary-General dies

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian diplomat who served as the sixth United Nations secretary-general, died on Tuesday.

Although 19 Security Council members supported a resolution backing his second term from 1997 to 2001, the United States vetoed the resolution, with support from Britain, South Korea and Italy.

Egypt’s state news agency said the United Nations chief died in a Cairo hospital, where he was reportedly admitted for a broken pelvis.

Noted for his dignified bearing and Old World style, Boutros-Ghali was the son of one of Egypt’s most important Coptic Christian families.

He led the United Nations during the period that saw genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia – all of this amidst increasingly stormy relations between the USA and the UN.

The worldwide community hoped Boutros-Ghali would fix a United Nations which TIME said in 1992 had become “overstaffed, underfunded and mismanaged” as well as “hobbled by petty politics”.

His bid for a second term was blocked by the US, a permanent member of the Security Council.

Boutros-Ghali was born on November 14, 1922 in Beni Sweif province south of the capital Cairo.

Boutros-Ghali had argued unsuccessfully during the negotiations for a Palestinian state and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to The New York Times. Later, the secretary-general played along in a sit-down interview with Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Ali G, who poked fun at “Boutros Boutros-Boutros-Boutros Ghali”.

Before the United Nations, Boutros-Ghali, whose grandfather was Egypt’s prime minister until his assassination in 1910, had worked in the administrations of Egyptian presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. Madeleine K. Albright led the movement to keep him from being reelected in 1996 as the U.N. Secretary General and Kofi Annan took his place. Boutros-Ghali later resigned in 2011, the year Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising.

Later, as an ascendent member of Egypt’s diplomatic class, he garnered seemingly countless academic degrees, including a PhD in global law from the University of Paris, and directed the Centre of Research of the Hague Academy of worldwide Law. Some see him as seeking to establish the U.N.’s independence from the world superpower, the United States.

However, he faced criticism for the UN’s failure to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. At the time, Washington criticized him for refusing to cut the United Nations’ budget. Boutros Boutros Ghali has also been blamed for asking the United States of America (USA) to intervene in Somalia against the militia leader Mohammed Farrah Aidid favouring the rival faction and ordering the capture of leaders of militia leading to the infamous battle of Mogadishu, on which the Hollywood movie “Black Hawk Down” has been made.