September 26, 2003	Friday	Rajab 28, 1424

PARIS: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was secretary-general of the United Nations between 1992 and 1996, says that in spite of efforts by President Jacques Chirac to build up the role of the UN as a global peace force, he’s outright pessimistic about the international organization’s future role.

“Indeed,” he notes during a series of interviews, “it’s as if we were back in 1919, before the creation of the League of Nations, just as if the United Nations had never existed.”

Boutros-Ghali, the 81-year-old Egyptian aristocrat who, like his father and grandfather was Egypt’s foreign affairs minister, observed: “I was downright wrong with regard to the role I foresaw for the UN when I was appointed in 1992.”

And, that role, he says today, was very much the same one that President Jacques Chirac would like to accord to the UN once again, that of a major international peacekeeping force that would replace traditional national armed forces like those of the United States which while invading Iraq flouted international law.

“I was convinced at the time that the United Nations was going to manage the new world order that came out of the end of the Cold War,” which is why, he says, one of the first things he did upon assuming his post was to put into place, with the support of the Security Council, an “agenda for peace” that, in a first phase, saw the stepping up of the UN Blue Beret forces throughout the world from 8,000 in 1989 to 75,000 in 1996.

“But,” notes Mr Boutros-Ghali, “my action was immediately met by an international outcry, for I ended up having taken too seriously the declarations made by the heads of state of the world who had told me that I should transform the UN, when all the while the transformation I proceeded to undertake with much energy ended up interesting nobody at all.”