FORMER United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali has died, Venezuelan UN Ambassador, Rafael Dario Ramirez Carreno, president of the UN Security Council for February, said yesterday. He was 93.

An Egyptian, Boutros-Ghali served one five-year term as UN chief from 1992 to 1996.

The 15-member Security Council observed a minute’s silence. No further details on his death were immediately available.

As the United Nations’ first secretary-general from Africa, Boutros-Ghali associated himself with the famine in Somalia and organised the first massive UN relief operation in the Horn of Africa nation.

But success eluded him there and elsewhere as the United Nations tottered in an increasingly disorderly post-communist world, with the world body and the big Security Council powers underestimating the deep animosity behind many conflicts.

He was criticized for the UN’s failure to act during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and for not pushing hard enough for UN intervention to end Angola’s civil war in the 1990s, which was at the time one of the longest running conflicts in the world.