Politics & Power Quote by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

“Marginal problem” lands like bureaucratic frost on a mass grave. Boutros Boutros-Ghali isn’t reaching for poetry; he’s wielding the dull, deadly language that powerful systems use to keep moral catastrophe at arm’s length. The line’s force comes from its quietness: not an accusation of cruelty, but a clinical report of priorities. That restraint is the indictment.

The specific intent is to document, for the historical record, how the world’s most influential actors internally ranked Rwanda in 1994: not as a crisis demanding presidential attention, but as a peripheral headache competing with domestic politics, Somalia’s fresh trauma, and the post-Cold War urge to avoid messy African entanglements. By anchoring the claim “according to this discussion I had with him,” Boutros-Ghali signals credibility and proximity. This isn’t hindsight moralizing; it’s an eyewitness footnote from the machinery of international decision-making.

The subtext is more cutting: the administration’s moral vocabulary was bounded by strategic calculus. “Marginal” implies that even as genocide escalated, the U.S. could treat it as an item on a crowded agenda rather than an emergency that reorders the agenda. It also gestures at the UN’s own frustration: Boutros-Ghali, as secretary-general, is both the system’s face and its supplicant, trying to extract urgency from a superpower that can afford to be bored.

Context turns the sentence into a lesson about how atrocity is enabled: not only by hatred on the ground, but by managerial distance at the top, where catastrophe becomes a scheduling problem.