Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Public Servant

1922-11-14 – 2016-02-16

Egyptian diplomat and statesman who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. He previously held senior roles in Egyptian foreign policy and international diplomacy. He remained an influential figure in global public affairs.

Quotes by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Rwanda was considered a second-class operation; because it was a small country, we had been able to maintain a kind of status quo. They were negotiating, they'd accepted the new peace project, so we were under the impression that everything would be solved easily.
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The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.
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I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.
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The real problem was not the troops; the real problem was that only the United States had the infrastructure to do the transport of troops with big planes, and then who will pay?
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We got involved in the Rwanda peace process for the simple reason that there was a decision which was taken by the Security Council, because the troops were in Uganda, and we decided to have a military presence.
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The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.
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But definitely, when a decision is taken, or when you are trying to oppose a decision, you are in a weaker position than the member states, because they know more about the situation than you. We gave information, but they never gave us any information.
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