'UN should dump Boutros-Ghali'

It now seems clear there will be diplomatic blood split over the selection of the next secretary-general of the United Nations. The man who holds the post, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, says he wants another five years in office.

When he was selected to the position in 1992, Mr. Boutros- Ghali said he only wanted to serve a single, five-year term. Now he has changed his mind. But in the intervening five years, the Egyptian diplomat has harvested many controversies and political enemies.

Among them is the United States government, which has assumed the lead role in the dump-Boutros-Ghali movement. Mr. Boutros- Ghali has already begun to exploit this opposition from Washington.

He has portrayed it variously as anti-African, anti-Third World, and racialist. He has also claimed he is a victim of the U.S. presidential election this year, and that President Bill Clinton has co-opted the general anti-UN tone of his Republican opponent.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali is wrong on all counts. The reason there is widespread opposition to renewing his role as secretary-general of the world body is because of his own actions since he took over the post at the beginning of 1992.

He has been an active and aggressive secretary-general. But he has been quixotic and secretive, as well. Most importantly as the day approaches when UN members must decide to reappoint or retire him, Mr. Boutros-Ghali has often been wrong. His power-mongering might have been excusable if his interference and pushiness had paid off. But it has not.

It was Mr. Boutros-Ghali who bullied the world into the Somalia crusade, ordered UN 'peacekeeping' forces to capture the warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid -- and then threw up his hands. He set up the greatest UN task force since Korea in Cambodia -- and left the country to fend for itself.

He demanded, and received, powers as a military commander, with the power of life and death on the former Yugoslavia -- and failed so badly that U.S. and European forces now appear unlikely to be able to put the pieces back together.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali is not a bad man, just the wrong man to lead the United Nations for another five years. Not only is his track record poor -- Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda -- but his vision is badly flawed.

His notion of the UN as a heavily-armed police force with independent tax sources deserves no support. There is no shortage of qualified candidates to be U.N secretary-general next Jan. 1, but Mr. Boutros-Ghali is not one of them."

-- The Bangkok Post