Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former U.N. Secretary General, Dies at 93

posted on: Feb 16, 2016

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

The New York Times

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian diplomat who led the United Nations in a chaotic 1990s tenure that began with hopes for peace after the Cold War, but failed to cope with genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia and ended in angry recriminations with Washington, died on Tuesday in an Egyptian hospital. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban later made a brief appearance before reporters at the United Nations, calling Mr. Boutros-Ghali “a memorable leader who rendered invaluable services to world peace and international order.”

The website of Al Ahram, Egypt’s state-owned newspaper, said Mr. Boutros-Ghali died in a hospital in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, where he had been admitted a few days earlier with a broken leg. He and his wife, Leia Maria Boutros-Ghali, had no children, Egyptian diplomats said.

A generation before violent protests boiled over in Cairo in 2011, Mr. Boutros-Ghali was a keystone of Egypt’s old-guard diplomacy, a senior minister to President Hosni Mubarak and to his slain predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat. He seemed to meet the tests of character and experience when, in 1992, he became the sixth secretary general of the United Nations, the first African and the first Arab to hold the post.

The scion of a politically active Coptic Christian family, he accompanied Mr. Sadat on his historic olive-branch mission to Jerusalem in 1977, then played a pivotal role in the Camp David accords. He was at the White House when Mr. Sadat, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Jimmy Carter signed the 1979 treaty ending a 31-year state of war between Egypt and Israel, a breakthrough in the history of the Middle East conflict.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former U.N. secretary general, died at the age of 93. His tenure was defined by tragedies in Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia as well as friction with the Clinton administration. By NEIL COLLIER and EMMA COTT on Publish DateFebruary 17, 2016. Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters.

There were doubts among diplomats about Mr. Boutros-Ghali. Was he, at 69, too old for a five-year term? Could an Egyptian Arab who had favored a Palestinian state be evenhanded in the Middle East? He went out of his way to reassure Israel, and Arab and African endorsements helped overcome the first President George Bush’s misgivings.

Strong-willed and independent, Mr. Boutros-Ghali took the helm determined to subdue aggression and pursue peace after the fall of Soviet Communism and a relaxation of East-West tensions that had long hamstrung the United Nations. He also resolved to attack the organization’s bloated bureaucracy and chronic money problems.

But he faced daunting tasks. Civil wars in Somalia and the secessionist states of Yugoslavia had already begun. Murderous conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis were hurtling toward genocide in Rwanda. And 60,000 United Nations peacekeepers were already thinly posted in a dozen trouble spots, including Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola and Mozambique.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali’s relations with the incoming Clinton administration were soured almost from the start in 1993 by foreign policy differences, political infighting and frictions between him and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright, who was Washington’s representative at the United Nations before succeeding Mr. Christopher at the State Department.

In his memoir, “Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga” (1999), Mr. Boutros-Ghali said the Americans had told him where not to travel, whom to avoid meeting and what to say and not say in speeches, and also to avoid ruffling President Bill Clinton, whom he regarded as thin-skinned and indecisive, and to stay away from Congress and soft-pedal talk of America’s $1.3 billion debt to the United Nations.

Even more than money, the United Nations needed American support for peacekeeping operations. But Mr. Boutros-Ghali said he had often been rebuffed when he tried to see the president and other officials to discuss what he called an “utterly confused” American foreign policy.

Mr. Clinton had taken office trumpeting enthusiasm for multinational humanitarian and peacekeeping operations. But a disaster in Somalia shocked the administration into a policy reversal, and it shied away from future interventions, especially in Africa.

American troops had entered Somalia in 1992 as part of a United Nations mission to feed starving victims of internal chaos. But when 18 Army Rangers were slain by warlord forces in 1993, and America saw searing images of a dead helicopter pilot dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the United States withdrew its forces and retreated from risky United Nations missions, humanitarian or military.

Thus America, like most other member states, tragically refrained from assisting a small, overwhelmed force of United Nations peacekeepers when Rwanda descended into genocidal slaughter and rape in 1994. Estimates varied widely, but the Rwandan government said 1.17 million people had been killed in 100 days. Mr. Clinton apologized years later for America’s inaction.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali’s frustration over the Clinton administration’s pattern of voting for tough Security Council resolutions, and then refusing to support the actions on the ground, had its paradigm in the civil war that raged from 1992 to 1995 in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict precipitated by the secession of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia and fueled by a tinderbox of ethnic, religious and regional differences.

Massacres, rapes, displacement of populations and other atrocities ensued, many in “ethnic cleansing” campaigns against Muslims. The Security Council deplored the violence, but its peacekeepers in Bosnia — Mr. Boutros-Ghali wanted 35,000, but got 8,000 — were wholly inadequate to subdue the fighting.

Aside from some airstrikes against Serbs, which the peacekeepers opposed even after Serb forces 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.

While he had said early on that he would not seek a second term as secretary general, Mr. Boutros-Ghali ran again. Late in 1996, the Security Council voted overwhelmingly to give him another term. But Ms. Albright, in her last days as the American delegate, cast a decisive veto as one of the five permanent Council members. Mr. Boutros-Ghali thus became the only secretary general denied a second term.

The Clinton administration insisted that its decision arose from policy differences with Mr. Boutros-Ghali, not personal animosity or politics. White House officials called him an ineffective reformer whose mere presence was impeding efforts to get Congress to pay America’s debt to the United Nations.

But Mr. Boutros-Ghali regarded the veto as an assault on his record and integrity. In “Unvanquished,” he portrayed himself as a dedicated civil servant hounded out of office by Mr. Clinton for election-year political gain.

He said the president had done so to undermine an accusation by Senator Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, that the administration had effectively put the United Nations in charge of the American military by giving the secretary general veto power over airstrikes against Serbs in Bosnia.

The General Assembly gave the departing secretary general a standing ovation as it ushered in his successor, Kofi Annan of Ghana. But a frustrated Mr. Boutros-Ghali, in a farewell rebuke, chided member states for failing to deal with disasters in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia.

“The concept of peacekeeping was turned on its head,” he said, “and worsened by the serious gap between mandates and resources.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born in Cairo on Nov. 14, 1922. His father had been finance minister, and his grandfather, a prime minister under the British, was assassinated in 1910.

Like his family, he represented the cosmopolitan class in Egypt between the wars that was immortalized in Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” novels. Indeed, some said he was the model for Nessim Hosnani, the Coptic financier of that tale.

He earned a law degree from Cairo University in 1946 and a doctorate in international law from the University of Paris in 1949. He was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University in 1954-55. For many years he was a professor at Cairo University, led its political science department and lectured around the world in Arabic, French and English.

In 1977, when Mr. Sadat decided to go to Jerusalem, his foreign minister, Ismail Fahmy, resigned in protest, as did another cabinet member, the minister of state for foreign affairs, Mohammed Riad, reflecting opposition to the overture in Egypt’s dominant Muslim majority and in the Arab world. In Mr. Riad’s place for the trip, Mr. Sadat named Mr. Boutros-Ghali. He had never held office but was known to support peaceful coexistence with Israel, and Mr. Sadat regarded his Coptic origins, reputation for fairness and marriage to an Alexandrian Jew, Leia Nadler, as potential assets in Jerusalem.

The three-day visit went well for Mr. Sadat, but not for Mr. Boutros-Ghali. A lean, slightly built man with glasses and an intense expression, he often looked awkward and ill prepared in the glare of klieg lights, addressing world news media in the unfamiliar role of government spokesman — a remarkable flop for a confident, fastidiously groomed, well-organized scholar with cool manners and a self-effacing wit.

But he was back to normal for the 1978 Camp David talks. While Mr. Sadat was the prime mover on the Egyptian side, observers said Mr. Boutros-Ghali argued cogently if unsuccessfully for a Palestinian state and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But the negotiations secured peace and Mr. Sadat’s primary objective: the return of the Sinai Peninsula, seized by Israel in the 1967 war.

In his memoir of the period, “Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem” (1997), Mr. Boutros-Ghali said he had often been frustrated at being excluded from Mr. Sadat’s inner circle and critical policy decisions and had disagreed with many of them. He said he had warned Mr. Sadat about Egypt’s growing isolation in the third world over the rapprochement with Israel, but eventually became convinced that retrieving the Sinai was worth it.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali joined the Mubarak government after Mr. Sadat’s assassination in 1981, focusing on foreign affairs. Besides pressing Israel to withdraw from occupied territories, he helped settle political and ecological disputes in Africa and in 1990 helped negotiate the release of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s imprisoned black leader.

When Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru decided to retire as secretary general in 1991, Mr. Boutros-Ghali broke tradition and campaigned for the job. Three Europeans, an Asian and a Latin American had held it, and it seemed Africa’s turn. Secretaries general are invariably compromise candidates, all but unknown to the world until their elections, and African and Arab support proved critical for Mr. Boutros-Ghali.

After his term, he was secretary general of La Francophonie, an organization of French-speaking countries, from 1997 to 2002. He then served three years as chairman of South Centre, which conducts research for developing nations.