Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Born	بطرس بطرس غالي 14 November 1922 Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt
Alma mater	Cairo University, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Sciences Po
Religion	Coptic Orthodox Christianity
Spouse	Leia Maria Boutros-Ghali
Party	Arab Socialist Union, National Democratic Party, Independent
"The UN Secretary General the West Loved to Hate"  Secretary-General of the United Nations In office 1 January 1992 - 31 December 1996 Preceded by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar Succeeded by Kofi Annan Ousted after US veto on second term  Secretary General of La Francophonie In office 16 November 1997 - 31 December 2002  Acting Egypt/Minister of Foreign Affairs In office 17 September 1978 - 17 February 1979  Acting Egypt/Minister of Foreign Affairs In office 17 November 1977 - 15 December 1977

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was an Egyptian politician and diplomat who was the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996, when he was ousted after the United States vetoed a second term. Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali was the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt between 1977 and 1979.

Background

Boutros-Ghali came from a Coptic Christian family of great prominence, with a grandfather who had been prime minister of Egypt.

Career

Boutros-Ghali was an academic by training and taught international law and international relations at Cairo University from 1949 to 1979. His political career began during the presidency of Anwar Sadat, who appointed him acting foreign minister in 1977. In that capacity, he helped negotiate the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty between Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. He was acting foreign minister until early 1991, when he was deputy foreign minister for a few months.

UN Secretary-General

His ascent as UN secretary-general came at the most difficult time. Restraints on Western power had been eroded by 1992. The Soviet Union had collapsed and the Third World bloc had been weakened by the debt crisis.

During his tenure at the UN, Boutros-Ghali laid out an Agenda for Peace (1992) and an Agenda for Development (1995). In the former, he argued for more robust UN action toward the sources of instability in the world.

Boutros-Ghali was deprived of the traditional second term for not authorizing NATO's bombing of Bosnian Serb targets in 1995 and for speaking the truth about the deadly Israeli bombing of a refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon in the following year when 106 civilians were killed and 116 injured.

In 1993, at a lunch with Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, and with Warren Christopher, US secretary of state, Boutros-Ghali said, "Please allow me from time to time to differ publicly from US policy." He recalled that Albright and Christopher "looked at each other as though the fish I had served was rotten." They said nothing. The sensibility of the moment was that the secretary-general of the UN needed to take his marching orders from the White House. The Americans do not want you merely to say "yes, he would later say, but "yes, sir."

Deposing - Operation Orient Express

In 1996 when the United States single-handedly browbeat the other fourteen then members of the Security Council to depose Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and replace him with Kofi Annan, who the preceding year had been appointed UN special envoy to NATO and authorized the NATO bombing in Bosnia behind the back of Boutros-Ghali.

Former Clinton and Bush administrations' National Security Council counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke told how:

[Madeleine] Albright and I and a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations, a secret plan we had called Operation Orient Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in doing in the UN head.
In the end, the US had to do it alone (with its UN veto) and Sheehan and I had to prevent the President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending Boutros-Ghali’s tenure, often by our racing to the Oval Office when we were alerted that a head of state was telephoning the President. In the end Clinton was impressed that we had managed not only to oust Boutros-Ghali but to have Kofi Annan selected to replace him.

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