Boutros-Ghali: a man of his time

The death of the former UN general secretary means the loss of the doyen of an era in the Arab world

Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali has died at the age of 93. (Jean-Pierre Muller / AFP)

The passing of former United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali is a sad moment for international diplomacy. Boutros-Ghali, who was 93, was there for some of the most historic moments of the 20th century – he was Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs when Anwar Sadat signed a controversial 1979 peace treaty with Israel; he secretly negotiated with Apartheid South Africa to get Nelson Mandela released. And he served at the head of the UN as that organisation failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre a year later.

But Boutros-Ghali was also the doyen of a group of diplomats who represented a particular era in the Arab world: the outward-looking, globally engaged Arab world. The best known living representative is probably Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian UN diplomat and former special envoy for Syria. As the republics became inward looking from the 1980s, such big figures were no longer nurtured. But there is hope that there will be a revival of such statesmen and women from a new generation now serving at ministries around the region.