Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 93, first U.N. chief from Africa

CAIRO - Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 93, a veteran Egyptian diplomat who helped negotiate his country's landmark peace deal with Israel but then clashed with the United States when he served a single term as U.N. secretary-general, died Tuesday at a Cairo hospital.

He had been admitted to the hospital after suffering a broken pelvis, the Al-Ahram newspaper reported.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali was the first U.N. 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 United States.

But after four years of friction with the Clinton administration, the United States blocked his renewal in the post in 1996, making him the only U.N. secretary-general to serve a single term. He was replaced by Ghanaian Kofi Annan.

The current president of the U.N. Security Council, Venezuelan Ambassador Rafael Ramirez, announced Mr. Boutros-Ghali's death at the start of a session Tuesday on Yemen's humanitarian crisis. The 15 council members stood in a silent tribute.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali's five years in the United Nations remain controversial. Some see him as seeking to establish the U.N.'s independence from the world superpower, the United States.

Others blame him for misjudgments 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 U.N., Mr. Boutros-Ghali said he had thought when he took the post that the time was right for the United Nations to play an effective role in a world no longer divided into warring Cold War camps. "But the middle years of this half decade were deeply troubled," he said. "Disillusion set in."

In a 2005 interview, Mr. Boutros-Ghali called the 1994 massacre in Rwanda - in which half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days - "my worst failure at the United Nations."

Mr. Boutros-Ghali also came under fire for the July 1995 Serbian slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in the U.N.-declared "safe zone" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia just before the end of the war.

His legacy was also stained in investigations into corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, which he played a large role in creating.

Noted for his dignified bearing and Old World style, Mr. Boutros-Ghali was the son of one of Egypt's most important Coptic Christian families. His grandfather, Boutros Ghali Pasha, was Egypt's prime minister from 1908 to 1910.

Born Nov. 14, 1922, Mr. Boutros-Ghali studied in Cairo and Paris and became an academic, specializing in international law.

In 1977, then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat named him minister of state without portfolio, shortly before Sadat's landmark visit to Israel to launch peace negotiations.

Sadat's rapprochement with Israel brought harsh criticism from across Egypt's political spectrum.

His foreign minister, Ismail Fahmi, resigned in protest at normalization with Israel. So Sadat turned to Mr. Boutros-Ghali, naming him acting foreign minister and minister of state for foreign affairs.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali played a major role in subsequent negotiations that produced the Camp David peace framework agreements in September 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in March 1979, the first such between an Arab state and Israel.