LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Boutros Boutros-Ghali : Leading a Revived United Nations Toward Peace in a Changing World

No U.N. secretary-general has had more opportunity and more snares. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the 70-year-old Egyptian professor and diplomat who has run the United Nations for a year, is the first secretary-general elected after the collapse of Soviet communism and end of the Cold War.

The new era has freed the United Nations of paralysis. It is no longer locked by enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United Nations can now step out.

But the new vigor--coming in a time of ethnic conflict--has encouraged new demands. Governments in tension like that of South Africa, countries in fear like Macedonia, populations in distrust like the Cambodians, nations in fragile peace like El Salvador, all call on the United Nations for help. Boutros-Ghali is surely the busiest secretary-general since Dag Hammarskjold in the 1950s.

Boutros-Ghali has surprised many U.N. diplomats and bureaucrats. He is a self-effacing, analytical man who seemed unlikely to provoke a stir. Yet he has proven a persistent leader unafraid of antagonizing some of the most powerful U.N. members--even the United States. In fact, he engaged in a public spat with the Security Council in July when he decided it had issued a statement on Bosnia without thinking out the implications.

Many diplomats look on the U.S.-led military intervention in Somalia as a personal triumph for the secretary-general. After a few months on the job, he began chiding the Security Council for focusing on the Bosnia problem while ignoring the starving Somalis. He asked if the white Muslims of Bosnia were more important to the Security Council than the black Muslims of Somalia. Now, with attention shifted to Somalia, he is warning against ignoring Bosnia.

When it became clear in November that the tiny group of U.N. peacekeepers had failed to keep the peace in Somalia, Boutros-Ghali quickly accepted the U.S. government’s offer to organize and lead a military intervention there.

The swift deployment of the U.S. Marines and soldiers, in fact, lent credence to the secretary-general’s “Agenda for Peace.” In this treatise issued in July, Boutros-Ghali set down the needs of the changing United Nations in a changing world. One of his key proposals was formation of a U.N. force--made up of special units from the world’s various armies--to move rapidly in a crisis.

Bosnia and Somalia will take up most of his time in the first days of the new year--he’ll visit both Europe and Africa. He is trying to negotiate a compromise with President Bush over the length of stay of the U.S. troops in Somalia. Boutros-Ghali wants them to stay until they have removed at least the heavy weapons from the bandits in Somalia. The U.S. government insists that the job of the troops is only to ensure that the relief reaches the starving of Somalia.

Some admirers say that Boutros-Ghali was almost bred for his job. A Coptic Christian born in an Arab land, he is married to a woman of Italian-Jewish descent. President Anwar Sadat brought this University of Cairo professor into the Egyptian government. When Sadat made his dramatic trip to Jerusalem in 1977, his foreign minister resigned in protest. So Sadat took Boutros-Ghali along as acting foreign minister instead. He participated in the Camp David peace talks in 1978 and later negotiated the historic treaty with the Israelis.

The secretary-general speaks Arabic, French and English fluently. He was educated mainly in the French language, however, and his English sometimes betrays a hint of French idiom and French grammatical construction.

Question: You came in as a longtime scholar of international organizations and the United Nations. Did anything surprise you in the first year?

Answer: I was surprised, first, by the amount of crisis. I had been trained to cope with one or two crises, but to cope with five or six, and during the same week, that is something new. Do you want me to give you an example? This month we have Somalia, a terrible situation in Angola, a difficult situation in Salvador, and the chronic problems of Yugoslavia. . . .

Secondly, what is new for me is the amount of contact you need with the different member states. I was accustomed to dealing with one boss in Egypt, with (President Anwar) Sadat and then (President Hosni) Mubarak. . . . Here, one time, you have to deal with five, six members, another time seven, another time 14, 15, 20. It changes all the time. And it takes a lot of energy.

The third element that is new--you cannot have a quiet diplomacy in this house (the secretary-general calls the United Nations “this house”). I was able to have contacts with the government of South Africa for more than two years, with (Foreign Minister Pik) Botha, with (President Frederik W.) de Klerk, while dealing with the release of Nelson Mandela. We met in different parts of the world, and nobody at all knew about this contact, with the exception of President Mubarak. . . .

Here, it is impossible to have this quiet diplomacy. Because after I give my OK to a report that I have read at night at home, the next morning I find it already reported in the American newspapers. There is leakage. You cannot have a quiet diplomacy.

Q: Let me ask you about the Bosnia situation. Do you have a feeling that Europe and the United States are using the United Nations to hide their own inaction?

A: No, because the U.N. has been created to be used by the member states.

Q: But I have a feeling that, when there’s trouble about Bosnia, then the U.S. Administration comes here to push a resolution that they don’t feel is going to do anything except get public opinion off their backs.

A: Even if it is true, this is diplomacy. The U.N. has been created to help the member states solve their problems. If you will solve problems by adopting certain resolutions that are more spectacular than practical, if this can help diffuse certain tension, why not?

Q: So it doesn’t hurt the United Nations?

A: I don’t say that it doesn’t hurt the U.N. I am saying that the U.N. has been created to do this. It can hurt the U.N., certainly. If you adopt a very practical resolution and the U.N., for different reasons, is not able to implement it, this will hurt the U.N.

The U.N. will be hurt because there are so many expectations. The fact is that the end of the Cold War created such an expectation. You had a crisis of credibility with the U.N. during the Cold War; now we have a crisis of too much credibility. So, by definition, because of this excessive credibility, whatever is done by the U.N. can hurt the U.N. because people--especially in the new-member states--are under the impression that the U.N. can do everything.

It is the paradox of public opinion. When public opinion is not interested in a problem, the governments are not interested, and the U.N., therefore, will not be able to tackle this problem. Yet, when public opinion is interested in a problem, you will have such a kind of excitation around the problem that it complicates our work.

When public opinion gets excited about a problem, it wants quick results. But, by definition, in these kinds of situations there are no quick results. It needs months of negotiations and months of energy and diplomacy to reach a beginning. Then, after reaching this beginning, we find ourselves beginning again at square one, as in the case of Angola.

Q: Let me ask you about Somalia. I think it has become almost a metaphor in newspapers for the U.N.’s ineffectiveness. What’s really gone wrong?

A: What is going wrong in Somalia is that it is a very particular case where you have no government. In all other cases you are dealing with one or two protagonists of a dispute. Then you can make an agreement with them. But in Somalia, there is no government. There is a kind of diffusion of the government. You have, rather than one government, 10 factions. This is something new in the peace process.

And, in the case of Somalia, you have a new situation where the humanitarian aid is looted by the factions. And only 10%, 20% or 30% of the food and humanitarian aid reaches the population.

So we have another new problem--how to protect? We cannot distribute humanitarian aid without special protection of the humanitarian aid.

Q: In your letter to the Security Council on Somalia, you said that, while the U.S.-led multinational force was acceptable, you would have preferred an augmented U.N. force. Can you explain why?

A: I would have preferred this because this would have been a whole operation under the unique leadership of the United Nations. We will have, in fact, a cooperation between the multinational forces with their own command and the United Nations. And it is always very difficult to do an operation with two different entities. . . . So we are trying to overcome the difficulties which are inherent to cooperation between two organizations.

. . . The (U.S.-led) unified command will do an operation very limited in time. While they are doing this, we are continuing the humanitarian assistance, and we are continuing the political considerations, and we are preparing ourselves for the rehabilitation of the country. As soon as they have left the ground, then we will assume directly all operations.

So for this reason, it is very important to have a complete cooperation between the two organizations--the multinational forces on one side, and the United Nations on the other.

Q: Once the multinational force leaves and the U.N. takes over, what kind of U.N. operation do you envision? Will the U.N. troops who take over have to be enforcers as well as peacekeepers?

A: We envision, in a certain way, the continuation of this operation. But again, it is too early to give you an answer. It depends. If the Americans, the unified force, finish and provide complete security through disarmament of different forces, then we will be able to continue the operation with just a peacekeeping operation. If we decided that it needs enforcement and the Security Council accepts enforcement, then we will have enforcement.

Q: Do you envision a kind of trusteeship?

A: No, I don’t like the word trusteeship. But certainly it depends on our success. Supposing that we’ll be able to promote easily a reconciliation and that the Somalis would be able to have a provisional government, then our role would be limited to rehabilitation, to technical assistance. But supposing that they may not be able to do this, then we may have to think about a (U.N.) authority--as we have in Cambodia.

Q: I wonder if it’s inevitable that the U.N. will get more and more away from the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of a member state.

A: I believe that the U.N. Charter has enough flexibility to cope with the new reality. The new reality is that you have, I don’t know, 2 million ships traveling all over the world, that you have 2 million people traveling all over the world, that you have the multinationals with their own power, and you have one market all over the world. You have this communication all over the world. So what we call interference exists already in practice. I can give you hundreds of examples--from AIDS to the movements of people from one part of the world to another part.

When you have what happened in Chernobyl having an effect all over the world, is it not interference? When you have the boats that have an accident on the French coast, and the oil reaches the coast of Brazil, is it not interference? So the new evolution of the world is based on a continuous interference.

So when the U.N. interferes, it is only reflecting the larger movements of intercommunication in the world. You will always have governments who oppose this U.N. interference, but the reality is that.

Q: Isn’t going into Somalia a new involvement in internal affairs?

A: No, because you are allowed to interfere, according to Chapter Seven. It is in the charter. (Chapter Seven of the U.N. Charter authorizes the United Nations to use force to repel aggression or deal with any other breach of international peace.) There is nothing new. And there is nothing new in the Iraq case. The news is that, in the past, Chapter Seven was not used because of the Cold War. Now it is possible to use it.

Q: You’ve said before that you plan just one term, and then you’re going to retire and write two books. What are the books?

A: One, I want to write something about the peace talks with the Israelis at Camp David, because nothing has been written from the Egyptian side or the Arab side. We have books which have been published by (former Israeli foreign minister) Moshe Dayan, by (former Israeli Defense Minister) Ezer Weizman, by President Carter, by (former Secretary of State) Cyrus Vance. There were three protagonists--the Israelis, the Egyptians and the Americans. Two of the protagonists have published a lot; the third one has published nothing. So I want to publish something on this.

Then I’m quite interested to publish a very academic book about the art of negotiation. What is the technique of negotiation? I don’t want to write about something abstract, but the reality.

Q: Do you have any time to work on this now?

A: Unfortunately, not. It’s impossible.