The Real Story Behind Clinton Administration’s “Win” Over Boutros-Ghali

by Kurt Holden

With the selection of Kofi Annan of Ghana to succeed Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general of the United Nations, America’s foreign policy-challenged president seems to have won a victory. But the former Egyptian foreign minister won, and the U.S. lost, hugely, in the court of world opinion. Boutros-Ghali won first when America’s oldest allies, Britain and France, joined all of the other Security Council members to produce a 14-to-1 vote to grant him a second term, something the Security Council has granted his predecessors.

Under Security Council rules, America’s single negative vote amounted to a veto. But that veto didn’t mean much as weeks went by without any other candidate able to secure enough support in the Security Council to replace Boutros-Ghali. Instead, the U.S. found itself almost completely isolated, with only Israel clearly siding with the U.S.

Israel could hardly join the rest of the world on the issue because it was stubborn U.S. support of Israel that got President Clinton into his fix in the first place. It is just one facet of the Clinton administration’s inattention to foreign policy that has resulted in a huge cut in U.S. foreign affairs funding in the four years Clinton has been president; the reduction of U.S. foreign aid to some $5.5 million in grants and loan guarantees for Israel and $2.1 in grants to Egypt for keeping the peace with Israel and not much else; and a delinquency of $1.4 billion in U.S. assessments to the U.N. That reduced the world organization to borrowing from its general budget to finance part of its peacekeeping operations, and deferring payments due to the peacekeepers themselves.

Although Secretaries-General Dag Hammarskjold, Trygve Lie and Kurt Waldheim came from Europe, U.N. members are trying to diversify the selections from continent to continent. U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar) has represented the Far East, and Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru has represented Latin America.

When Africa’s turn came around five years ago, former Egyptian Foreign Minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Coptic Christian married to a Jew and the grandson of an assassinated prime minister of Muslim Egypt, seemed ideally suited for the position. One of the Egyptian diplomat’s many accomplishments was playing a key role in the Camp David agreement that resulted in the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab government. After he successfully lined up majority support among both the Christian and Muslim nations of Africa, his election for his first term was assured.

His turbulent five-year term included tensions with the United States over continued American abstention from UNESCO, largely over criticism of Israel that surfaced in UNESCO activities and publications; the failed U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia; the Bosnia operation which succeeded only after the U.S. committed ground as well as air and naval forces to it; and other ongoing U.N. peacekeeping operations in Cyprus, Lebanon and elsewhere in the world.

During the same period the U.S. fell far behind in meeting its assessments for U.N. peacekeeping operations. At one point in mid-1996 the amount the U.S. owed had reached $1.7 billion, some three-fifths of the U.N.’s entire $2.6 billion annual budget.

Keeping the Peace

It fell to Boutros-Ghali to keep the peace between the U.S., which complains that its assessment of one-third of U.N. annual dues is too high, and the other nations of the world, which have agreed to renegotiate annual dues, but only after the United States pays its delinquent assessments. In fact, the low-key Egyptian diplomat had seemed moderately successful in balancing the conflicting demands of the real world and the world of isolationist chairman Jesse Helms of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose goal is to reduce the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment to little more than a visa office.

The truth is that whenever the U.S. has had a clear foreign policy goal, Boutros-Ghali supplied the validating United Nations resolutions. If he orchestrated crushing majorities for the embargo of Iraq, however, he could not stem even greater majorities for condemnation of Israeli actions that undercut the Middle East peace process. He particularly displeased the Israel lobby that drives American Middle East policy when, after the massacre by a Jewish settler of 29 Muslim men and boys at prayer in Hebron, he offered U.N. peacekeepers to protect the residents of that Palestinian West Bank town.

In the spring of 1996, Boutros-Ghali suffered his professionally fatal head-on collision with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright and other keepers of the Israeli flame within the Clinton court. They wanted him to suppress a United Nations report, prepared by Dutch Maj. Gen. Franklin Van Kappen, on the killing of some 100 civilians, including two American children, who had sought shelter in a United Nations compound at Qana from Israeli shelling and bombing of towns and villages in southern Lebanon. The report, subsequently endorsed by Amnesty International and other international organizations, suggested that Israeli artillerymen either had purposely targeted the U.N. peacekeepers from Fiji and the refugees under their protection at Qana, or were criminally negligent in the manner in which they aimed the shells that fell in the United Nations compound

That was in May, and in June the White House declared that it would wield its veto if necessary to prevent the re-election of Boutros-Ghali to a second term. At the time the White House said it did not believe the Egyptian was able to reform the spending practices of the United Nations. Subsequently, as international support solidified around Boutros-Ghali, White House spin-masters claimed that relenting on the issue would give the Republicans an issue in the U.S. elections.

However, after the U.S. elections were over Bill Clinton had the chance of climbing back from the limb on which he had isolated himself, or winning a Pyrrhic victory by forcing the U.N. to forego its first choice and elect a secretary-general that no one but the United States wanted. Ordinarily this would have been no problem for Clinton, who is famously adept at shifting with the winds of public opinion. The problem here was that he’s been steadfast as a rock when it comes to following the wishes of the Israel lobby, which was firmly against a second term for Boutros-Ghali.

At this point, it is possible that to save his country’s huge annual U.S. aid appropriation Boutros-Ghali will finally bow out completely, or to please the U.S. all Security Council members with veto power will unite around an alternative candidate. However, either action will outrage other U.N. member nations and make the Egyptian diplomat an icon for those protesting American “arrogance of power.”

If neither Clinton nor Boutros-Ghali backs off, the issue may follow the precedent set in 1950 when the Soviet Union vetoed the reappointment of Trygve Lie in the Security Council. With U.S. backing, the problem was referred to the General Assembly, which reappointed him. If the U.N. follows that precedent, the vote for Boutros-Ghali may be so overwhelming that it will feed the desire of American isolationists not only to continue to withhold U.S. dues, but to withdraw from the U.N. altogether.

In recent months President Clinton has proven himself a master of the political flip-flop. Now is one time when the world needs a demonstration of the champion at the top of his form.