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
For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.
But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it's happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing - In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.
We must rid the world of the scourge of these agents of death and destruction
I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.
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.
So this is why I'm always say happy that somebody mentions Rwanda, because behind Rwanda, we have Africa.
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.
In Yugoslavia, I'd asked for additional forces too. I even went to meet the French prime minister, and I proposed additional forces... Nobody wanted to send troops.
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.
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.
I believe it will take time to find a solution to the problem. Thus we must have patience.
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 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 next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics