Former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali dies

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a veteran Egyptian diplomat who helped negotiate his country’s landmark peace deal with Israel but then clashed with the US when he served a single term as UN secretary-general, has died aged 93.

Mr Boutros-Ghali, the scion of a prominent Egyptian Christian political family, was the first UN chief from the African continent. He stepped into the post in 1992 at a time of dramatic world changes, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the beginning of a unipolar era dominated by the US.

However, after four years of friction with the Clinton administration, the US blocked his renewal in the post in 1996, making him the only UN secretary-general to serve a single term.

Mr Boutros-Ghali’s five years in the UN remain controversial. Some see him as seeking to establish the UN’s independence from the world superpower, the US.

Others blame him for misjudgements in the failures to prevent genocides in Africa and the Balkans and mismanagement of reform in the world body.

In his farewell speech to the UN, Mr Boutros-Ghali said he had thought when he took the post that the time was right for the UN to play an effective role in a world no longer divided into warring Cold War camps.