Boutros Boutros-Ghali
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Boutros Boutros-Ghali CC (born November 14, 1922) is an Egyptian diplomat and the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996.
Boutros-Ghali was born in Cairo, Egypt, into a Coptic Christian family that had already provided Egypt with a prime minister (Boutros Ghali, 1846–1910). He graduated from University of Cairo in 1946 and earned a PhD in international law from the University of Paris as well as a diploma in international relations from the Paris Institute for Political Studies 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.
He had served as Egypt's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1977 until early 1991. He then took the post of Deputy Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs for several months before moving to the UN. During Boutros-Ghali's term in office 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.
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 Rwandan genocide, which ultimately killed about 800,000 people, and he appeared unable to muster support in the UN for intervention in the continuing civil war in Angola. His reputation thus became entangled in the larger controversies over the effectiveness of the UN and the role of the US within 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. Boutros-Ghali was also accused by some survivalist organizations in the US of seeking to impose a tyrannical, UN-dominated world government.
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 the resolution for a second term, 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, Boutros-Ghali was the first UN secretary-general to not be elected to a second term in office.
Boutros-Ghali was succeeded at the UN by Kofi Annan. Since Boutros-Ghali was not given a second term, a successor was chosen from his region, Africa.
From 1997 to 2002 Boutros-Ghali was Secretary-General of La Francophonie, an organization of French-speaking nations.
Boutros-Ghali has published two memoirs:
- Egypt's road to Jerusalem (1997), about the Israel-Egypt peace settlement
- Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (1999), about his time as Secretary-General at the UN