Daily Inspiration Quote by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

A diplomat’s complaint, delivered with the plainness of someone used to being politely ignored. Boutros Boutros-Ghali is not describing a media fluke or an unfortunate oversight; he’s indicting the hierarchy of human concern that structures international politics. The repetition of “genocide” works like a metronome: Europe, Turkey, elsewhere, and then the jarring admission that Africa doesn’t trigger the same reflex. It’s a controlled escalation meant to make the double standard impossible to euphemize.

The subtext is aimed at the institutions he knew intimately: the UN Security Council, Western capitals, and the global press. “Attention” here is a proxy for everything that attention unlocks - emergency aid, sanctions, peacekeepers, sustained diplomatic pressure, even the permission to name a crime as a crime. When he says “basic discrimination,” he’s pointing to a deeper bias than policy disagreement: a default assumption that African catastrophes are perennial, complicated, and therefore tolerable. Not less tragic, just less urgent.

Context matters. Boutros-Ghali’s tenure as UN Secretary-General coincided with Rwanda and the broader post-Cold War moment when “never again” became a slogan with selective enforcement. The quote also carries a careful universality: he doesn’t claim Africa is uniquely victimized by genocide; he argues the world ranks genocides, and Africa is consistently ranked down. Coming from a public servant, not an activist, the line is a strategic moral rebuke - the kind that tries to shame power into consistency without pretending power is naturally consistent.