UN chief presided over a series of peace deals at the end of the Cold War
Javier Perez de Cuellar, who has died aged 100, was a soft-spoken Peruvian diplomat who led the United Nations as its fifth secretary-general through bitter confrontation with the United States Congress during the Reagan administration to a period of unprecedented peacemaking that coincided with the end of the Cold War.
Perez de Cuellar, who served as UN secretary-general from 1982 to 1991, was a practitioner of quiet diplomacy. He gained a reputation in his first term as a competent yet bland bureaucrat who appeared powerless to stem the tide of conflicts in
Afghanistan, the
Middle East and the Falkland
Islands. He caught his stride after his
1986 reelection, overseeing a succession of peace deals in Central America, Africa and the Persian Gulf.
‘‘If I want to be effective, I have to be discreet,’’ he said in his acceptance speech that defined his tenure. ‘‘I am not running for the Nobel Prize.’’
The UN peacekeepers, however, won the Nobel Peace Prize under his tenure, in 1988. But his most enduring legacy remains his quiet efforts to coax the UN Security Council’s five permanent members – including Cold War superpowers the US and the Soviet Union – to work quietly together to forge a peace deal ending the Iran-Iraq war, a conflict that cost more than one million lives.
The Cold War’s demise led to an era of intense UN activism, and Perez de Cuellar seized on the thaw to pursue peace agreements in places such as El Salvador, and to help shape postwar settlements in Namibia and Cambodia. Ironically, the ‘‘new world order’’ he assiduously promoted culminated with the first Gulf War, a conflict he sought unsuccessfully to avert.
‘‘Perez de Cuellar took an organisation that had almost self-destructed and become irrelevant, and found a role for it that no-one expected,’’ said the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as President Gerald Ford’s UN ambassador.
Javier Felipe Ricardo Perez de Cuellar de la Guerra was born in Lima.He graduated with a law degree from Catholic University in Lima and took his first job in the Peruvian foreign service as a clerk to pay his law school tuition.
He once said he decided on a diplomatic career because ‘‘it helps you to know countries, and at someone else’s expense’’. He spent the next several decades in postings as Peru’s ambassador to Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Venezuela, France and the UN.
He joined the UN in 1975, under secretarygeneral Kurt Waldheim. He was selected for the top job as a compromise candidate after Waldheim, running for a third term, deadlocked with the Tanzanian foreign minister, Salim Ahmed Salim.
‘‘He took an organisation that had almost selfdestructed and become irrelevant, and found a role for it that no-one expected.’’
Perez de Cuellar received fewer votes than some other candidates, but he prevailed because he was the only one who didn’t get vetoed. ‘‘The key to the Peruvian’s election appears to be his inoffensiveness,’’ according to a Los Angeles Times article at the time.
His first term was marked by painful diplomatic setbacks, including the unsuccessful efforts to oversee the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, end the civil war in Lebanon or to negotiate a peace deal between Britain and Argentina during the 1982 Falklands War. His relations with the Reagan administration were strained, and the US withdrew from Unesco in 1984. Congress also imposed a ban on funding for programmes that offered abortions or abortion counselling.
His second term coincided with the arrival of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and a series of political and economic reforms. Perez de Cuellar oversaw a string of diplomatic successes, including peace deals ending the Iran-Iraq war and conflicts in El Salvador, Namibia and Mozambique. He said he viewed the UN ‘‘as the protector of civilised behaviour in the jungle of international affairs’’.
But he was not without his detractors, who maintained that his studiously cultivated image for self-effacement, independence and impartiality masked a more ambitious streak and a willingness to yield to the interests of powerful states to achieve those ambitions.
His decade at the helm of the UN peaked dramatically, on his final day, with the initalling of what became the El Salvador peace accords, signed in 1992 by his successor, the Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Perez de Cuellar’s first marriage, to Yvette Roberts, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. In 1975, he married the former Marcela Temple Seminario; she died in 2013.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush presented Perez de Cuellar with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour. After his UN retirement, Perez de Cuellar remained active in diplomacy and politics, mounting a failed 1995 campaign against Alberto Fujimori for president of Peru. He subsequently served as Peru’s president of the Council of Ministers and its ambassador to France. – Washington Post