Former UN Chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali dead at 93

Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose term was marked by war in the former Yugoslavia, famine and genocide in Africa and confrontation with the United States, died on Tuesday (February 16). He was 93.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said he was saddened by his predecessor’s death.

“The late Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was a respected statesman in the service of his country, Egypt. He was a well-known scholar of international law and brought formidable experience and intellectual power to the task of piloting the United Nations through one of the most tumultuous and challenging periods in its history, and guiding the Organization of the Francophonie in subsequent years.”

The 15-member U.N. Security Council observed a minute’s silence after the death was announced on Tuesday by Venezuelan U.N. Ambassador Rafael Dario Ramirez Carreno, head of the Security Council for February.

An Egyptian, Boutros-Ghali served as U.N. chief from 1992 to 1996. He died at Al Salam Hospital in Cairo on Tuesday, an official at the hospital said.

As the United Nations’ first secretary-general from Africa, Boutros-Ghali associated himself with the famine in Somalia and organized the first massive U.N. relief operation in the Horn of Africa nation.

But success eluded him there and elsewhere as the United Nations tottered in an increasingly disorderly post-communist world, with the world body and the big Security Council powers underestimating the deep animosity behind many conflicts.

Boutros-Ghali, who had a reputation for being proud and prickly, also took on the daunting task of reorganizing the U.N. bureaucracy by slashing posts and demoting officials at a pace that earned him the nickname “the pharaoh.”

Ban said that “Boutros Boutros-Ghali did much to shape the Organization’s response to this new era, in particular through his landmark report “An Agenda for Peace” and the subsequent agendas for development and democratization. He showed courage in posing difficult questions to the Member States, and rightly insisted on the independence of his office and of the Secretariat as a whole. His commitment to the United Nations – its mission and its staff — was unmistakable, and the mark he has left on the Organization is indelible.”

In 1996, 10 Security Council members led by African states sponsored a resolution backing him for a second five-year term but the United States vetoed Boutros-Ghali when his reappointment came up for a vote.

Many diplomats suggested he was jettisoned by U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration during an election year to pre-empt criticism from Republicans deeply hostile to Boutros-Ghali and the United Nations, which they wanted to see undergo more reform.

Boutros-Ghali came from a wealthy family and his grandfather was Egypt’s prime minister until his assassination in 1910. Before the United Nations, he had worked in the administrations of Egyptian presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.

He accompanied Sadat on the historic 1977 visit to Jerusalem and played a prominent role in the subsequent Camp David accords on the Middle East.

Under Mubarak, Boutros-Ghali was the architect of Egypt’s return to the center of affairs in the Organization of African Unity, the Nonaligned Movement and the Islamic Conference Organization.

In the U.N. job, Boutros-Ghali was criticized for its failure to act during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and for not pushing hard enough for U.N. intervention to end Angola’s civil war, which at the time was one of the longest running conflicts in the world.

Boutros-Ghali found himself jeered in Sarajevo, Mogadishu and Addis Ababa. His style was to wade into crowds and confront protesters when security guards permitted. “I am used to fundamentalists in Egypt arguing with me,” he told Reuters.

He shocked many in Sarajevo when he said he was not trying to belittle the horrors in Bosnia but that there were other countries where the “total dead was greater than here.”

He told Somali warlords and clan leaders to stop accusing the United Nations and him of colonialism, adding that Somalis should be worried that former colonial powers would ignore their plight if they continued to fight.

“The Cold War is finished,” he said. “Nobody is interested in the poor countries in Africa or anywhere in the world. They can easily forget Somalia in 24 hours.”

Boutros-Ghali headed the United Nations as the body was redefining itself. He was the first secretary-general in the post-Cold War era and at a time when it was taking on more international peacekeeping work, operations that often were criticized for doing too much or too little.

As an Egyptian, he was able to claim to be both Arab and African. He also was a Coptic Christian from a mainly Muslim country and married an Egyptian Jew, who converted to his religion.

He was passionate about the works of French painter Henri Matisse, whom he knew when he studied in Paris, smoked an occasional cigar and drank Scotch with water – a taste he said he acquired “after 70 years of British occupation” of Egypt.

Boutros-Ghali later served as secretary-general of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, an organization of French-speaking nations, and as director of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights.