Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali dies at age 93

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian diplomat who served as the sixth U.N. secretary-general, died on Tuesday. He was 93.

Boutros-Ghali died in a hospital in Egypt’s capital Cairo after being admitted for a broken pelvis, according to Egyptian media.

U.N. Security Council President Rafael Ramirez announced his passing at the beginning of a session on Yemen’s humanitarian crisis on Tuesday.

As Egypt’s minister of state for foreign affairs and acting foreign minister in the 1970s, Boutros-Ghali played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Camp David peace framework agreements and the Egyptian peace treaty with Israel, the first between an Arab state and Israel.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is surrounded by reporters as he leaves the White House after meeting with then-President Bill Clinton in this Feb 23, 1993, file photo. Photo by Reuters stringer

Boutros-Ghali served only one term as U.N. secretary-general, from January 1992 to December 1996, after the United States blocked his renewal due to tensions with the Clinton administration including Boutros-Ghali’s reluctance to bomb the Serbs in Bosnia after the Serbs killed thousands of Muslims in a U.N.-declared “safe zone.”

Critics also said he failed to adequately respond to the 1994 massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, something he called “my worst failure at the United Nations” in a 2005 interview with the Associated Press.

Boutros-Ghali was succeeded by Kofi Annan as U.N. secretary-general.

Boutros-Ghali continued his career as secretary-general of La Francophonie, an organization of countries and regions where French is the mother tongue, from 1997 to 2002. He then served as chairman of the board of the South Centre, a research firm for developing countries, from 2003 to 2006. And he was director of the Egyptian National Council of Human Rights from 2003 to 2012.

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