Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga
By Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Random House,
NY, 1999, 352 pp
Book review by Tom Gallagher
Z Magazine, March 2000
Some will remember that before serving as spokesperson for the
victims of erectile dysfunction, Senator Robert Dole was the 1996
Republican nominee for the United States presidency. The election
years for the four year term of the presidency and the five year UN
Secretary General’s term coincide only every 20 years. Unfortunately
for Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 1996 was one of those years, and as the
former Egyptian Foreign Secretary sees it, the coincidence led
directly to his becoming the first Secretary General denied a second
five year term.
Bob Dole, you see, didn’t care for Boutros-Ghali. In his
acceptance speech at the Republican convention, he announced that
under his presidency, “our armed forces will know that the president
is their commander-in-chief—not Boutros Boutros-Ghali or any other
U.N. Secretary General.” And, oh yes, whenever Dole pronounced his
name he did it mockingly—Boo-trus, Boo-trus.
As we well know, when the Republicans have strong feelings
against something, President Clinton usually will find that he
doesn’t care for it all that much either. As Boutros-Ghali sees it,
eventually “the White House was competing with the Republicans to
see who was more anti-UN.” By that logic, Boutros-Ghali ultimately
had to go; his bid for a second term failed in the Security Council
on a vote of fourteen in favor to one against, the one being the
American veto.
Unvanquished is Boutros- Ghali’s attempt to convey the gulf
he sees between “The world outside the United States (that) saw a
solid record of UN accomplishment,” and
inside, where “the United Nations was called an inefficient and
bloated bureaucracy and—laughable though this was—a danger to
American sovereignty.”
As the first post-Cold War Secretary General he presided over a
United Nations with greatly expanded responsibilities: when he left,
the UN had 70,000 peacekeeping troops—5 times the number when he
started—stationed in 17 nations around the world. However, only 67
out of 159 member nations were paying their full dues; the rest were
a combined $848 million in arrears for the regular operating budget
(the U.S. alone accounted for $517 million of this deficit), and
owed another $1.2 billion for the cost of peacekeeping missions.
As a result, he was forced to sound the alarm that the UN might
not be able to continue operations and to suggest independent
funding sources, including a levy on arms transfers, interest
charges on unpaid assessments, and “payment of UN peacekeeping
assessments out of national defense budgets, which would illustrate
how small were the costs of UN peacekeeping in comparison with the
huge military outlays of the major powers.”
The program did not go over well in the U.S. His proposed tax on
international air tickets “was denounced in the Senate as an attempt
to impose taxes on American citizens in defiance of the U.S.
Constitution.”
Boutros-Ghali did sometimes make things more difficult for
himself. He acknowledges that he has “never been known for
downplaying my abilities,” and is “not the easiest person to deal
with,” and he did give the appearance of monumental insensitivity
when he told the residents of besieged Sarajevo that they had “a
situation that is better than ten other places in the world ... I
can give you a list.” He insists that he meant only that Bosnian
Muslims should be encouraged by the worldwide concern over their
fate, in contrast to numerous other conflicts in which the outer
world displayed little interest.
As the first UN Secretary-General from Africa, Boutros-Ghali was
particularly disturbed with the world’s declining attention to that
continent, home to many of the world’s “orphan conflicts.” His
problems in dealing with the U.S. were epitomized by events in
Somalia, where the U.S. raid in South Mogadishu was famously
unsuccessful. Eighteen U.S. soldiers, one Malaysian soldier, and “by
later press investigations, as many as a thousand Africans” were
killed in “an operation planned, decided, and launched entirely
without the knowledge of United Nations officials.” But the U.S.
failure would be blamed on the UN, with what The Economist
called, “a chutzpah level high even by American standards.”
Boutros-Ghali’s belief that “The UN can only do what the U.S.
lets it do,” seems to be supported by the experience of the
Yugoslavian war crimes tribunal—the first “authorized not by a
country victorious in war, but by the international community as a
whole.” The tribunal’s investigators have reported that although the
U.S. has been a major supporter of the effort, it has failed to
provide evidence requested of it regarding possible war crimes
committed against Serb civilians during “Operation Storm.” This
non-cooperation presumably stems from the fact that this military
campaign, conducted by the Croatian army shortly before the Dayton
Peace Agreement, was carried on with Washington’s tacit support. The
U.S. has also opposed the creation of a permanent war crimes court,
out of fear of its potential for manipulation by countries hostile
to it.
Of course, the Middle East was a major source of difficulties for
Boutros-Ghali, as it has been for every Secretary General. He was
accused of “treason against the Muslim world,.... But in American
political circles I was assumed to be biased against Israel and
against the United States in general.” His report on the Israeli
shelling of a UN observation post at Qana, in southern Lebanon, six
months before the end of his term likely eliminated what slim
reelection possibilities he might still have had. The action killed
100 civilians who had taken refuge there. The report concluded that
it was “unlikely that the shelling was the result of gross technical
and/or procedural errors,” outraging Israel, and the U.S.
As The Economist saw it, “Boutros-Ghali is the most
effective head of the United Nations in history, and the Americans
hate him for it.” In her campaign to defeat
his re-election bid, Madeline Albright asked Polish diplomats, “Who
would you rather have as your friend—Bill Clinton or Boutros-Ghali?”
Boutros-Ghali’s final conclusion is that “the United States sees
little need for diplomacy; power is enough.”
Tom Gallagher is a freelance writer living in California, and a
long-time activist.
