Spotlight on New U.N. Chief Boutros-Ghali

At a time of great expectations for a new U.N. era of boldness, the international organization is now headed by an Egyptian diplomat long regarded as a paragon of caution.

That diplomat, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, has led the United Nations for only one month, and the world’s public knows very little about him. In fact, worldwide television took notice of him for the first time when he addressed the summit meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday.

Since taking office Jan. 1, the 69-year-old diplomat has avoided the press. He has held no news conferences and has even abandoned former Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar’s practice of replying to two or three questions from reporters every morning when arriving at the U.N. Secretariat building. The new secretary general insists that he needs more time to familiarize himself with the problems of the United Nations before meeting regularly with the press.

While that has made U.N. correspondents grumble, it has pleased some analysts who know the United Nations well. “That sounds rather sensible to me,” said Brian Urquhart, a former undersecretary general. “It’s a nice change to have a public figure who doesn’t talk out long before he is ready to do anything.”

Richard N. Gardner, a professor of international law at Columbia University and a former U.S. ambassador, also urged outsiders not to misjudge the secretary general’s cautious manner.

“I think people are going to be surprised by Boutros-Ghali,” Gardner said. “I have known him over the years. In a crisis, he will know how to lead. Everything about his history shows he is a superb diplomat and totally committed to the United Nations.”

Evidently bowing to the secretary general’s desire for more time to understand the United Nations, the Security Council decided this week to postpone until July the deadline for Boutros-Ghali to produce a major report on his recommendations for strengthening the international body so that it can play a decisive role in preventing crises from erupting into war. Members of the Security Council had originally wanted to set May as the deadline for the report.

Formal commissioning of the report by world leaders was one of the highlights of the Security Council summit, and it put a renewed spotlight on Boutros-Ghali. David Hannay, the British ambassador to the United Nations, said he expects the report to become “a significant turning point in the history of the organization.”

“We need to stop crises before they break out into bloodshed instead of going in and mopping up after things are over,” he said.

Even before preparing this program for what U.N. officials are calling “preventive diplomacy,” Boutros-Ghali may come up with another plan for streamlining the vast and unwieldy U.N. bureaucracy. Although the Egyptian diplomat was not originally favored by President Bush for secretary general, the United States acquiesced in his selection only after he agreed to reorganize the bureaucracy. This has made many bureaucrats nervous, but the secretary general has offered no hints about what he intends to do.

Boutros-Ghali, a Coptic Christian in a Muslim-dominated country, had long served as deputy foreign minister and then deputy prime minister of Egypt. Fluent in Arabic, French and English, he was the Egyptian figure most called on to explain Egyptian policy to foreign correspondents. But he was never looked on as an important policy-maker himself.

Boutros-Ghali was an obvious choice to carry Egypt’s message to outsiders. With a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne in Paris, he is so Western that, according to an Egyptian journalist, “he thinks in French even when he writes in Arabic.”

The secretary general comes from a family long involved in Egyptian politics. A grandfather, Boutros Pasha Ghali, was assassinated as prime minister in 1910. An uncle served as foreign minister in the 1920s.

Boutros-Ghali, however, kept away from public office at first, teaching international law at Cairo University for 28 years before President Anwar Sadat brought him into government in 1977.

The new deputy foreign minister then found himself with sudden, surprising prominence when the foreign minister resigned rather than accompany Sadat on his dramatic trip to Jerusalem in 1977. Boutros-Ghali went instead and, as acting foreign minister, the future secretary general then helped Sadat negotiate the Camp David accords with Israel.