War & Peace Quote by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Boutros Boutros-Ghali is doing what seasoned diplomats often do when the moral temperature spikes: he cools the room by widening the frame. By insisting that “disruptions in the peace process” weren’t unique to Rwanda, he shifts the conversation from a singular catastrophe to a pattern of post-conflict fragility across the 1990s UN portfolio. The intent is defensive but also managerial. It’s an attempt to relocate Rwanda from the category of scandal to the category of case study.

That move matters because it trades horror for process. “Disruptions” is technocratic language that sandpapers the jagged edge of what Rwanda became in 1994. In the same breath, he invokes Cambodia, Mozambique, and El Salvador - conflicts where UN involvement is often remembered as imperfect but legible: ceasefires, elections, demobilization. The subtext is: look, peacekeeping is messy everywhere; don’t treat Rwanda as proof the entire model is bankrupt, or as personal indictment.

Yet the rhetorical pivot also exposes the UN’s chronic vulnerability: it can describe instability better than it can stop it. By bundling Rwanda with other missions, Boutros-Ghali is normalizing the very thing that made Rwanda intolerable to normalize - the speed and scale of civilian slaughter amid bureaucratic caution and member-state reluctance. Contextually, this is the era when the UN was asked to do ambitious “peacebuilding” with thin mandates and thinner political backing. His comparison is accurate on paper, but it also reads like an institutional reflex: when confronted with failure, reach for precedent, not penitence.