Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

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6th Secretary-General of the United Nations
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Boutros Boutros-Ghali CC (Arabic: بطرس بطرس غالي) (born November 14, 1922) is an Egyptian diplomat who was the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996. He is the brother of Egyptian writer Waghuih Ghali.

Academic career

Boutros-Ghali was born in Cairo into a Coptic Christian family ("Boutros" being Arabic for "Peter") that had already provided Egypt with a prime minister (Boutros Ghali, 1846–1910). He graduated from Cairo University in 1946 and earned a PhD in international law from the University of Paris as well as a diploma in international relations from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (best known as simply Sciences Po) in 1949. The same year, he was appointed Professor of International Law and International Relations at Cairo University, a position which he held until 1977. He became President of the Centre of Political and Strategic Studies in 1975 and President of the African Society of Political Studies in 1980. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Columbia University from 1954 to 1955, Director of the Centre of Research of The Hague Academy of International Law from 1963 to 1964, and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at Paris University from 1967 to 1968.

Egyptian political career

He had served as Egypt's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1977 until early 1991. He then became Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs for several months before moving to the UN. As Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, he played a part in the peace agreements between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

UN career

Elected to the top post of the UN in 1992, Boutros-Ghali's term in office remains controversial. He was criticized for the UN's failure to act during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which officially left about 937,000 people dead, and he appeared unable to muster support in the UN for intervention in the continuing civil war in Angola. One of the hardest periods for his office during the first term, was certainly one of resolving the crisis and the UN diplomatic and humanitarian work during the wars in countries created after disintegration of former Yugoslavia. His reputation thus became entangled in the larger controversies over the effectiveness of the UN and the role of the US in the UN. For his detractors, he came to symbolize the UN's alleged inaction in the face of humanitarian crises, while his defenders often accused the US of blocking UN action.

Second term

In 1996, ten Security Council members, led by three African members (Egypt, Guinea-Bissau and Botswana) sponsored a resolution backing Boutros-Ghali for a second five-year term, until the year 2001. However, the United States vetoed a second term for Boutros-Ghali. In addition to the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, South Korea, and Italy did not sponsor this resolution, although all four of those nations voted in support of Boutros-Ghali (after the US had firmly declared its intention to veto). Although not the first vetoed (China vetoed the third term of Kurt Waldheim in 1981), Boutros-Ghali was the first and only UN secretary-general not to be elected to a second term in office.

Boutros-Ghali was succeeded at the UN by Kofi Annan.

Later life

From 1997 to 2002 Boutros-Ghali was Secretary-General of La Francophonie, an organization of French-speaking nations. From 2003 to 2006, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the South Centre [1], an intergovernmental research organization of developing countries. He is currently President of the Curatorium Administrative Council at the Hague Academy of International Law.

In September 2004, Boutros-Ghali, in an interview on Egyptian television, called the United States a "totalitarian regime" in its dealings with the rest of the world, according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute. [2]

Works

Boutros-Ghali has published two memoirs:

• Egypt's road to Jerusalem (1997), about the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty
• Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (1999), about his time as Secretary-General at the UN

Quotes

"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy ... The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States." [3] [4]

"The best way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence." [5]

References

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Preceded by: Javier Pérez de Cuéllar

UN Secretary-General 1992-1996

Succeeded by: Kofi Annan

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