Egyptian Official Selected as U.N. Secretary General

Butros Butros Ghali, the deputy prime minister of Egypt and an urbane 69-year-old diplomat with wide contacts in the industrialized and developing worlds, was selected by the Security Council on Thursday to serve as the sixth U.N. secretary general.

Under the U.N. charter, the choice must be confirmed by the General Assembly. But the assembly has never rejected the council’s choice before and is expected to approve Butros Ghali in an overwhelming vote.

Butros Ghali, a Coptic Christian Arab who speaks French and English and is married to a Jewish woman, was one of the candidates of the African bloc at the United Nations. But it was widely assumed that most African governments would have preferred Bernard Chidzero, Zimbabwe’s finance minister; he failed to gather enough support outside Africa for the job.

Butros Ghali, if approved by the General Assembly, will succeed Javier Perez de Cuellar at the end of the year for a five-year term. He will manage the United Nations at a time when the international organization is believed to have more influence and power than ever before.

The Egyptian diplomat was en route to Bonn for talks with German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher when elected by the council. His wife, Maria Leia, reached by phone in Cairo, told the Reuters news agency, “I’m very proud for Egypt, I’m very proud for my husband, and I’m sure he will do a wonderful job.”

Butros Ghali and Chidzero had shared the lead in most of the unofficial straw polls conducted by the Security Council in the last few weeks. But Chidzero fell well behind in the council’s first official ballot Thursday.

The Bush Administration appeared to have played no more than a passive role in the selection of Butros Ghali, although, as one of the five permanent members of the council, it could have vetoed him if it had wanted to block the selection. For many months, U.S. officials had indicated that they felt the time had come for a dramatic choice, that the United Nations should be run not by a diplomat but by a well-known political figure who could tame the organization’s massive bureaucracy and enhance its image in the public eye.

When Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was nominated more than a month ago, it was assumed that he was the personal choice of President Bush. But Mulroney’s nomination angered Africans, who believed that it was an African’s turn to serve as secretary general. They threatened a General Assembly floor fight if an African were not named to the post. In the face of this anger and objections by members of his own party at home, Mulroney withdrew his nomination; the Bush Administration never came up with another candidate.

Butros Ghali, who had served as acting or deputy foreign minister of Egypt for 14 years before his appointment as deputy prime minister earlier this year, appealed to many circles at the United Nations.

Fluent in English, French and Arabic, he satisfied the French demand that the secretary general be a French speaker. As an Egyptian diplomat, he satisfied the Chinese demand that the secretary general come from the Third World. And since Egypt is a member of the Organization of African Unity, he satisfied the African demand that the secretary general come from that continent.

But in the long run, that could prove an irritant to black African governments that clearly wanted the secretary general to come from one of their countries. “One thing the black Africans don’t want is to see the Security Council select a North African and then be told for 40 years that you’ve had your turn,” a State Department official said recently.

But there was no show of this kind of attitude in U.N. corridors after the vote. African diplomats and African U.N. staff members hugged each other just inside the front door of the council’s chambers.

Butros Ghali is best known in the United States for his work on the Camp David accords that led to a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. When the Egyptian foreign minister resigned in protest over Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s decision to fly to Jerusalem in November, 1977, Butros Ghali was appointed acting foreign minister and accompanied Sadat on the historic visit. Butros Ghali then led the Egyptian team that met with Israeli negotiators in Washington to prepare the groundwork for the Camp David meetings between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

In selecting Butros Ghali, the Security Council named a diplomat who has had long experience in the study of international law, as well. Holder of a doctorate from the University of Paris, Butros Ghali taught international law at Cairo University for 28 years before Sadat brought him into his Cabinet in 1977. He is the author of a dozen books.

When Butros Ghali was first nominated by the Organization of African Unity for the post, he was asked by reporters if the fact that he is a Christian Arab would trouble Muslim Arab governments. He replied that he hoped, instead, that it would be “a chance to show how liberal we are in this region.”

Butros Ghali’s name has often come up in the past for important U.N. posts. In 1985, he lost out in the competition for the post of U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. He later said that American and Israeli opposition had stopped the appointment. He withdrew from the race for head of UNESCO in 1987 so as not to challenge its controversial African secretary general, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, who tried but failed to win a third term. And he turned down suggestions in 1989 that he run for chief of the International Labor Organization.

At that time, Butros Ghali told journalists that because of his age he no longer had any ambition to be an international bureaucrat. “After a certain age, you cannot change or you must be wise enough not to change,” he said, insisting that he intended to retire near the age of 70 and start writing his memoirs. But the lure of leading an international bureaucracy--the largest international bureaucracy of all--finally worked on him, and he is likely to have little time now to work on memoirs.

Meisler reported from Washington and Goldman from the United Nations.

Biography: Butros Butros Ghali Born: Nov. 14, 1922, in Cairo Education: Law degree, Cairo University, 1946; doctorate, University of Paris, 1949. Personal: He is a Coptic Christian and is married to an Egyptian Jew. He is an amateur collector of antiques. Fluent in Arabic, English and French. Career Highlights: Professor of international law, head of department of political sciences, Cairo University, until 1977. Named minister of state for foreign affairs in October, 1977; acting foreign minister in 1977-78; later promoted to deputy prime minister. Sources: International Who’s Who, Times Wire Services