U.N. chief at helm during turbulent global times
The 1st African secretary general clashed with US
CAIRO — Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a veteran Egyptian diplomat who helped negotiate his country’s landmark peace deal with Israel but clashed with the United States when he served as U.N. secretarygeneral, died Tuesday. He was 93.
Boutros-Ghali, the scion of a prominent Egyptian Christian political family, was the firstU.N. chief from the African continent. He steppedinto the post in1992 at a time of dramatic world changes, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a unipolar era dominated by the United States.
His five years at the helm remain controversial. 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. Some blame him for misjudgments in the failures to prevent genocide in Africa and the Balkans and mismanagement of reform in theworld body.
After years of frictions with the Clinton administration, the United States blocked his renewal in the post in1996, makinghimthe only U.N. secretary-general to serve a single term. He was replaced byKofi Annan of Ghana.
InaU.N. Security Council session Tuesday, the 15 members held a moment of silence upon news of his death in a hospital in the Egyptian capital. He had been admitted after suffering a broken pelvis, Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper reported lastweek.
“The mark he has left on the organization is indelible,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. He said Boutros-Ghali “brought formidable experience and intellectual power to the task of piloting the United Nations through one of the most tumultuous periods in its history.”
Boutros-Ghali called the 1994 massacre inRwanda— in which a half-million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days — “my worst failure at the UnitedNations.”
But he blamed the U.S., Britain, France and Belgium for paralyzing action by setting impossible conditions for intervention. Then-President Bill Clinton and other world leaders were opposed to taking strong action to beef upU.N. peacekeepers in the tiny Central African nation or intervening to stop the massacres.
The Bosnian War also brought the same contentious mix of issues: U.N. peacekeeping, world powers’ intervention and limits, and the need to protect civilians from atrocities. During a December 1992 visit toBosnia’s capital Sarajevo, under a brutal Serbian siege, he insisted to angry local journalists that upcoming peace talkswere the solution and told them he knew of at least 10 places where conditions were far worse than Sarajevo — the sort of answer that deepened his reputation for arrogance.
His legacy was also stained by investigations into corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, whichheplayeda large role in creating.
Three suspects in the probe were linked to him either by family relationship or friendship.
In writings after leaving the U.N., he accused Washington of using the world body for its own political purposes and said U.S. officials often tried to control his actions.
Hewrote inhis1999book “Unvanquished” that he “mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Neither does theUnited States.”