Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Boutros Boutros-Ghaliwas an Egyptian politician and diplomat who was the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nationsfrom January 1992 to December 1996. An academic and former Vice Foreign Minister of Egypt, Boutros-Ghali oversaw the UN at a time when it dealt with several world crises, including the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan Genocide. He was then the first Secretary-General of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie from November 1997 to December 2002...
NationalityEgyptian
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth14 November 1922
CountryEgypt
It has long been recognized that an essential element in protecting human rights was a widespread knowledge among the population of what their rights are and how they can be defended.
Water will be more important than oil this century
The next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics
I will continue to work for the advancement of freedoms in Egypt and the Arab world until I drop dead. ... Education itself - which can and should play an important role in the apprenticeship of tolerance and respect for other people - sometimes encourages identitarian closure, or even extremist behaviour ... It is therefore vital to ensure that education does not encourage rejection of other people or identitarian closure, but that on the contrary it encourages knowledge and respect for other cultures, other religions and other ways of being and living.
The lesson I learned in Cairo still applies. The only way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.
While the broad principles of democracy are universal, the fact remains that their application varies considerably ... We are at the beginning of the road, at the very beginning. We still have a long way to go.
I believe it will take time to find a solution to the problem. Thus we must have patience.
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.
There is a greater fatigue concerning the African problem today than five or 10 years ago. The situation now in Africa is worse today than it was 10 years ago.
So this is why I'm always say happy that somebody mentions Rwanda, because behind Rwanda, we have Africa.
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.
We must rid the world of the scourge of these agents of death and destruction
We were not realizing that, with just a machete, you can do a genocide.