Boisterous Egyptian diplomat and former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali kissed the world goodbye early this week. He was aged 93. His death in a hospital in Cairo reverberated across the world. Effervescent, courageous and controversial, Boutros-Ghali was a different person to different people. Some saw him as a non-conformist whose misjudgements led to avoidable genocides in Africa, the Balkans and the mismanagement of reform in the world body. Others saw him as a world statesman whose pivotal role in the Camp David Accord, helped negotiate his country’s landmark peace deal with Israel. Ghali was roundly condemned for approving a secret $26 million arms sale to the government of Rwanda in 1990 when he was Foreign Minister of Egypt. The weapons stockpiled by the Hutu regime was part of the fairly public, long-term preparations for the subsequent genocide. He was serving as UN Scribe when the killings occurred four years later.
A prodigious intellectual, he sought to assert the UN’s independence from the world superpower, the United States and this led to a clash. After four years of friction with the Clinton administration, the United States blocked his re-nomination in 1996, making him the only UN secretary-general to serve a single term. He was replaced by the Ghanaian, Kofi Annan. He stepped into the post in 1992 at a time of dramatic world events, 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.
In his farewell speech to the UN, Boutros-Ghali said that he had thought, when he took the post, that the time was right for the United Nations to play an effective role in a world no longer divided into warring Cold War camps. A senior minister to President Hosni Mubarak and to his slain predecessor, Anwar Sadat, Boutros-Ghali was a keystone of Egypt’s old guard diplomacy who proved to be the nemesis for Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo who had aspired to that office of the sixth secretary general of the UN.
He oversaw the UN at a time when it dealt with several world crises. He dwarfed Obasanjo who, trailed by local opposition led by his kinsman, Prof. Wole Soyinka, lacked the requisite language skills, character, diplomatic etiquette and experience when the office became vacant. The first African and the first Arab to hold the post, Boutros-Ghali was a scion of a politically active Coptic Christian family.
Strong-willed and independent, Boutros-Ghali came under fire for the July 1995 Serb slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in the UN–declared “safe zone” of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia just before the end of the war. In 1999, families of the victims listed Boutros-Ghali as one of the international officials they wanted to sue for responsibility in the deaths. His legacy was also stained in investigations into corruption in the UN oil-for-food programme for Iraq, which he played a major role in creating.
Born November 14, 1922, Boutros-Ghali studied in Cairo and Paris and became an academic, specialising in international law. After stepping down as UN secretary general, he wrote Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga, a colourful account of his tenure as Secretary-General.
The diplomat–statesman came into a troubled world and played his role to the best of his ability. Now he has moved on, we wish him blissful repose.
-Leadership Editors