Profile : Activist U.N. Leader on Firing Line : His arrogance alienates many. But Boutros Boutros-Ghali is the boldest secretary general in decades.

When American officials warned U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to stay out of Somalia’s capital, those closest to him knew the issue was settled. “Once he has made up his mind,” an aide said, “you cannot change it. No matter how you protest, he sticks to his original idea. The stronger the protest, the more stubborn he becomes. If you tell him not to go to Mogadishu, he will go to Mogadishu. I can assure you that he is going to Mogadishu.”

A couple of days later, on Oct. 21, the slight Egyptian with oversized glasses and the thinnest of smiles, the statesman and old professor who will mark his 71st birthday this Sunday, flew into Mogadishu airport. He unnerved American military officers, set off a few boisterous though nonviolent protest demonstrations by the Somali followers of warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, confined his entire visit to the airport and stayed in the capital only two hours. But he made his point.

This secretary general, the sixth in the 48-year history of the United Nations, is beholden to no one. He might, as he often makes clear, desperately need the support of the United States to make the United Nations work. But the United States cannot order him around.

The secretary general could not resist a humorous allusion to the Mogadishu trip a week later when he addressed the annual banquet of the private U.N. Assn. in Washington.

“As you know,” he said in the magnificent colonnaded hall of the old Civil War pension building, “I have many friends in Washington. They always have my best interests at heart. For example, they advised me not to go to Mogadishu. They said it wasn’t safe.

“But when my friends learned I was coming to Washington, I did not hear one word of warning. So I take that to mean I am safe here.”

Boutros-Ghali may be safe in Washington, but there is little doubt that his authority and the prestige and future of the United Nations have been undermined by the Clinton Administration in recent weeks. Many Americans now blame him and the United Nations for what they regard as the debacle of Somalia.

When 18 American troops died at the hands of Aidid’s militia on the first weekend in October, President Clinton was quick to shed his Administration of almost all responsibility and point a damning finger at Boutros-Ghali and the United Nations.

The President did this even though American officials had helped craft every Security Council resolution authorizing U.N. actions in Somalia, even though the American troops were operating under Pentagon, not U.N., command. What was seen as the President’s rewriting of recent history was so blatant that it infuriated even those U.N. officials who dislike their exacting, demanding, workaholic secretary general.

The United Nations has not seen a leader like Boutros-Ghali since the hectic days of Dag Hammarskjold. The present excitement largely reflects the times: The end of the Cold War has left the world with a procession of conflagrations. It also has freed the Security Council of the paralysis locked in by the vetoes of the United States and the Soviet Union, giving it the flexibility and freedom to deal with these conflagrations.

Countries in trouble--Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Mozambique, Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, to name a few--now cry out to the United Nations for help as if, in the words of U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, it is an international 911 telephone number.

Yet the times might have passed the United Nations by if the secretary general had been one of the more passive bureaucrats of the past. A cautious Kurt Waldheim, for example, might have been too hesitant to seize the moment.

But Boutros-Ghali believes fervently that the United Nations must become more active and that it must have the authority and firepower to deal with these conflagrations whenever feasible. Six months after taking office in 1992, in response to a request of the Security Council, Boutros-Ghali produced a lengthy policy statement known as “An Agenda for Peace” that advocated the use of U.N. military force when necessary and the dispatch of new, heavily armed “blue helmets” to serve as peace enforcement troops.

This is a revolutionary concept. Force was used against North Korea during the Korean War and against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. But these were American-led enforcement operations under U.N. blessing. Until Boutros-Ghali, the United Nations had not had a real enforcement operation of its own since the blue helmets put down the secession of Katanga in the murderous Congo in the early 1960s.

Boutros-Ghali’s place in history will probably be measured by the ability of the United Nations to fulfill the role set down in his “Agenda.” If the concepts prove wild and unworkable, he probably will be derided as a leader who came up with a foolish idea at a critical moment in U.N. history.

The Somali debacle has prompted some critics to doubt the value of the concept of peace enforcement, but Boutros-Ghali still believes.

Since taking office in 1992, the secretary general has presided over the three largest U.N. operations in history: the dispatch of 22,000 soldiers and civilian personnel to Cambodia, more than 24,000 to the former Yugoslav republics and 28,000 to Somalia.

But he has not invoked his ideas about peace enforcement recklessly. In Cambodia, he and his mission chief, Yasushi Akashi of Japan, did not send U.N. troops into action when the Khmer Rouge boycotted and threatened to ruin the Cambodian elections last May. Restraint proved justified when the boycott fizzled. Cambodia is now regarded as the most significant success of Boutros-Ghali’s administration.

Boutros-Ghali has always been cautious about U.N. involvement in the former Yugoslav republics. He has consistently warned that the United Nations cannot act as impartial cease-fire line observers between the Serbs and Croats in Croatia and then try to repel Serbian aggression in Bosnia. The two roles, he says, are not compatible.

Bosnia depresses the mood of many U.N. officials. Jose Maria Mendiluce, the former U.N. official in charge of refugee work in Bosnia, charges that the West has used the United Nations as an “alibi.” Whenever the public accuses governments in the West of failing to do anything about Serbian aggression in Bosnia, the governments point to the U.N. relief operation to prove that they are doing something.

When the U.N. mission began in Somalia in May, it was regarded as the model for the kind of peace enforcement set down by Boutros-Ghali in his “Agenda.” But he has encountered as many snares in the Horn of Africa nation as Hammarskjold did in the Congo (now Zaire) in the 1960s.

Determined that the United Nations would play a role in the wave of decolonization on the continent, Hammarskjold--who died in a plane crash in Africa in 1961--used U.N. troops to put down the secession of the rich province of Katanga from the Congo. The battles were bloody (the United Nations lost 234 troops in the four years of the mission), and Hammarskjold, though he had the support of then-President John F. Kennedy, bickered continually with Russia, Britain, France and Belgium. The Congo operation was so unsettling that the Security Council did not authorize another peace enforcement operation until Boutros-Ghali asked for troops for Somalia 30 years later.

Boutros-Ghali prides himself on intellectual consistency. But, some critics insist, this consistency also leads to an intellectual arrogance that alienates many actors on the international scene. Boutros-Ghali has no constituencies and few public supporters. France and many African governments campaigned to put him in office, but he has refused to favor their nationals in making his appointments. Africans resent his hectoring to better their miserable lot. Most of the 15 ambassadors on the Security Council chafe under what they regard as his disdain. He rarely holds news conferences and sees only a handful of favored reporters privately from time to time. He is never afraid to speak his mind--not even to American presidents and secretaries of state.

The most remarkable aspect of the finger-pointing by Washington over Somalia may be the fact that, when it happened, no one of any international stature stood up to defend him.

Boutros-Ghali, who will begin his third year as secretary general in January, is a wealthy Coptic Christian who grew up in an impoverished Egypt. He was named for his grandfather, a prime minister assassinated by a fanatical Muslim nationalist in Cairo in 1910. A professor of international law at the University of Cairo for more than 25 years, Boutros-Ghali did not enter government until 1977 when then-President Anwar Sadat, trying to open lines to the Copts, named him a minister of state for foreign affairs. Within a month, the professor found himself flying into Jerusalem alongside Sadat.

This second career proved bountiful as Boutros-Ghali negotiated the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and then served as Egypt’s point man for relations with Africa. When Javier Perez de Cuellar announced his retirement as secretary general, Boutros-Ghali quickly announced his candidacy. To the surprise of the United States, which was sure he would fall short of votes, the Security Council elected him secretary general in November, 1991.

No secretary general has ever had more to do: Crises in Somalia, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique and Iraq have all landed on the U.N. plate. Boutros-Ghali likes to describe himself as the powerless servant of the Security Council. But so much is going on in so many places at once that the ambassadors on the council depend on him and his staff to investigate everything and recommend courses of action. Boutros-Ghali keeps on top of these portfolios by working long hours into the night and turning down an incessant flow of social invitations.

“He is unreasonable,” a senior U.N. official said. “He has no social life in the evenings. He does not watch television. He is always working. And he expects everyone to be like him.

“When we had a weekend storm, he wanted some report finished, and I assembled my staff that Saturday to do it. Since there were no secretaries available, I gave his security officer the copy as it was, with handwritten notations throughout. He then called me up and asked, ‘Why did you send such a report?’ and criticized my staff for not working. That got me angry.”

Stories about his haughty arrogance and flashes of anger are legion at the United Nations. Yet he exhibits a kind of 19th-Century courtly charm in private--especially to those willing to listen to his professorial analyses of complex world problems.

Although he spent 15 years in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, he is notably nondiplomatic. Sometimes this helps him illuminate the heart of an issue. Annoyed by a Somali journalist’s question that painted the United States as a neo-colonialist power because of its intervention in Somalia, Boutros-Ghali lectured the reporter and all Somalis at a news conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last January:

“The Cold War is finished. Nobody wants control over Somalis. . . . Some Somalis believe Somalia has strategic value. That’s not true. No one is interested in Somalia, not for strategic reasons, not for oil, not for gold. . . . There can be a real tragedy someday. The world could forget Somalia in a few minutes.”

Trying to persuade the people of Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, that the world is full of terrible problems like their own, all demanding peaceful negotiated settlements, Boutros-Ghali, flying into Sarajevo last New Year’s Eve, told the people there, “I can tell you 10 places that are worse than you.” He meant sites of bloodshed and starvation such as Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, and he may have been right. But it was clearly an impolitic thing to say.

He has troubled relations with the Security Council. “The ambassadors think he does not treat them with deference,” said a European diplomat who knows several members of the council well. “But I understand the secretary general. He is a politician. Egypt has not been easy for him. He is not an Arab. He is married to a Jew. . . . He has survived in the Egyptian system through his political skills.

“What are the ambassadors to him? They are fonctionnaires (bureaucrats). Of course, they are highly skilled and respected. But they are still fonctionnaires. “

Since the reputation of Boutros-Ghali hangs so much on the crisis in Somalia--his model for peace enforcement--it’s worth looking carefully at what really happened there.

When then-President George Bush dispatched 28,000 Marines with heavy armor to Somalia last December, Boutros-Ghali insisted that the powerful Americans disarm the warlords, preparing the way for a weaker U.N. peace enforcement contingent to follow and maintain order.

Although the Security Council resolution authorizing the American intervention required that the troops create “a secure environment,” Bush balked at any major American role in disarmament. Professing to be shocked by the secretary general’s demand, an assistant secretary of state accused Boutros-Ghali of trying to change the goal posts in the middle of the game.

The Administration wanted to deliver the food and rush out. Bush’s special envoy to Somalia, Ambassador Robert B. Oakley, kept appearing on American television from Mogadishu, bemoaning Boutros-Ghali’s “foot-dragging” on the U.N. takeover. Boutros-Ghali countered in private that he was still not able to put together a U.N. force strong enough to replace the Americans.

To give the United Nations some backbone, the Americans agreed to leave 3,000 troops behind for logistics and provide a Quick Reaction Force of 1,300 troops for emergency operations. Later, the Americans added 950 Rangers.

U.S. officials persuaded Boutros-Ghali to accept an Americanization of the command. Retired Adm. Jonathan Howe was handpicked by Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, to serve as the U.N. official in charge of the whole operation. The Americans selected an old NATO friend, Lt. Gen. Cevik Bir of Turkey, as the military commander, and Maj. Gen. Thomas Montgomery of the U.S. Army, as his deputy. Under an unprecedented arrangement for the United Nations, all the American troops except the Rangers reported to Montgomery rather than Bir; the Rangers reported directly to the Pentagon.

Some U.N. officials were aghast that Boutros-Ghali would accept so blatant an American takeover. But the secretary general knew that American support was vital. He told his aides not to worry. “Admiral Howe is only on a three-month contract,” he said in May, implying that someone of another nationality would take the American’s place. But Boutros-Ghali soon felt satisfied with the work of the taciturn, strait-laced Howe. “Admiral Howe acts like a U.N. official, not an American official,” a close associate of the secretary general said a few weeks later.

The Somali adventure turned sour in June when Aidid’s militia ambushed Pakistani peacekeepers, killing 24. This transformed the operation--with Security Council and thus American approval--into a personal hunt for Aidid. The Wild West atmosphere--Rangers descending into compounds on futile raids for Aidid that left many Somalis and some peacekeepers dead--should have alerted Boutros-Ghali that Howe was heading toward disaster. But the Clinton Administration was just as negligent; no one there sounded an alarm until September.

On Sept. 20 in New York, after the Americans suffered some casualties in Somalia, Secretary of State Warren Christopher handed Boutros-Ghali a confused secret document, made available to The Times, which proposed three steps: A change of emphasis from military action to political nation-building, a continued hunt for those who murdered peacekeepers, and negotiations aimed at a cease-fire and the exile of Aidid to another country.

Despite later public posturing about less emphasis on military action in Somalia, the American Rangers, under U.S. command, staged the raid a few days later that ended in the deaths of 18 men. That debacle panicked the Congress and public, and led Clinton to announce an American withdrawal by next March 31. He also augmented U.S. forces in the interim and dispatched Oakley back to Somalia to negotiate with representatives of Aidid and the other warlords.

When Ambassador Albright and Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, head of the U.S. Central Command, briefed Boutros-Ghali on Clinton’s new plans for Somalia, he lectured both of them: The United States had already confused the military situation in Somalia and now it was confusing the political situation by sending Oakley. “When he left the meeting,” an aide said, “he had this glint in his eye that he always has when he feels he had made his point strongly and spoken his mind.”

But he calmed down in subsequent meetings with Albright. At the end of the third session, he kissed her as she left his office. “Tell everyone we kissed,” he joked to his staff.

There are critics now who contend that peace enforcement is an idea dreamed up by Boutros-Ghali and foisted on the world. Yet U.N. peace enforcement is probably one of the most fashionable new ideas in political science these days. A host of think tanks and committees, including one headed by R. James Woolsey, now Clinton’s CIA director, have issued weighty reports in the last year calling on the United Nations to assume some kind of active military enforcement role in the post-Cold War era.

Boutros-Ghali, as intellectually stubborn as ever, persists in believing that, even if American reluctance makes it difficult or even impossible now, the United States and other powers will have to embrace U.N. peace enforcement in the future.

“We must decide when, and how, to make such action just and sensible and effective in the right kind of cause,” he told the U.N. Assn. in Washington. “ . . . If the moment is not seized, then history will be unforgiving.”