Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian veteran diplomat who helped negotiate the peace agreement between his country and Israel, but who then confronted the United States when he served as Secretary General of the UN, has died at age 93. Boutros-Ghali, the eldest son of a prominent Egyptian Christian family, was the first UN chief from the African continent.
He took office in 1992 at a time of great geostrategic changes in the world, 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. However, after four years of friction with the Clinton administration the United Nations blocked the renewal of his office in 1996, making him the only UN secretary general to serve only one single term. He was replaced by Kofi Annan.
Boutros-Ghali at UN headquarters, 1 February 1994 (UN Photo, Milton Grant)
The current president of the Security Council of the UN, the Venezuelan, Rafael Ramírez, announced the death of Boutros-Ghali this Tuesday, at the start of the session on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The 15 council members paid tribute with a minute of silence. The five years of Boutros-Ghali at the head of the United Nations was controversial. Some see him as one of the supporters of the independence of the international organisation against the world’s superpower, United States. Others blame him for failing to prevent the genocides in Rwanda in 1994, where half a million moderate Tutsis and Hutus were killed in only 100 days, and the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995.
The editorial team of Katoikos
