CAIRO / AMN /
Former U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghalipassed away Tuesday. he was 93. He was first UN chief from African continent. A veteran Egyptian diplomat who helped negotiate his country’s landmark peace deal with Israel but then clashed with the United States when he served a single term as U.N. secretary-general.
Boutros-Ghali, belonged to a prominent Egyptian Christian political family. He stepped into the post in 1992 at a time of dramatic world changes, 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.
His five years term remained controversial. He worked to establish the U.N.’s independence, particularly from the United States, at a time when the world body was increasingly called on to step into crises with peacekeeping forces, with limited resources.
Boutros-Ghali was born on 14 November 1922 into a Coptic Christian family in Cairo, and educated at Cairo University and in Paris, where he established a lifelong connection with France.
He went on to study international relations at Columbia University in New York and became Egypt’s foreign minister in 1977, under president Anwar al-Sadat.
After leaving the UN, Mr Boutros-Ghali served from 1998 to 2002 as secretary general of La Francophonie – a grouping of French-speaking nations.
In 2004, he was named the president of Egypt’s new human rights council, a body created by then-Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak amid US pressure on Arab nations for democratic reform.