Mohamed Sahnoun
Diplomat who fought for Algerian independence then led the way in resolving conflicts in Africa
MOHAMED SAHNOUN, who has died aged 87, was a diplomat who dedicated his career to finding peaceful solutions to conflicts around the world, particularly in Africa. Trusted by successive UN Secretaries-general, he would find leaders admired by the warring parties and persuade them, with gentleness and patience, to help him.
He enlisted, for example, the assistance of Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda, and other African leaders, in preventing a bloodbath in Kinshasa in DR Congo, and he eventually brought President Kabila to the signing of a peace accord under the stewardship of Nelson Mandela in 1999.
At one point in the 1990s, dealing with five conflicts at once in Africa on the UN’S behalf, for six months he slept almost entirely on aeroplanes, travelling without anti-malarials and eating little because both sapped his energy. The Home Office refused to grant him residence in Britain because he could not spend the qualifying period in the country.
Mohamed Sahnoun, known to many as “Mehdi”, or “Leader”, was born in Chlef, Algeria, on April 8 1931, the son of an imam. He attended lycée, going on to the Sorbonne in Paris. He had entertained ambitions of becoming a film director, but his last instruction from his father, who died before his son left for France, was that he should fight for Algerian independence, and when the rebellion broke out he returned home and began working in the Social Centres that had been set up to combat poverty and illiteracy.
When the organisation’s members were rounded up, Sahnoun was arrested and tortured, as he would recall in his autobiographical novel Mémoire Blessée (“Wounded Memory”). When he was eventually released he fled to France, then attended New York University, from which he graduated in Political Science.
When independence was won in Algeria, Sahnoun became diplomatic adviser to the country’s provisional government. In 1962, as the Cuban missile crisis was developing, he was in Washington with the Algerian President, Ahmed Ben Bella, visiting John F Kennedy, who had supported Algerian independence as a senator. The President asked Ben Bella to fly to Cuba to present a private message to Fidel Castro, warning him that the US would be prepared to go to war if necessary. The message, said Kennedy, “is important for all humanity”. It was passed on and nuclear Armageddon was averted.
From 1964 until 1973, Sahnoun was deputy secretary-general of the Organisation for African Unity, then for two years served as deputy secretary-general of the League of Arab States, with responsibility for dialogue with African nations. In 1975 he became Algeria’s ambassador to West Germany until 1979, then ambassador to France for three years.
During his time as head of the Algerian diplomatic mission to the United States (1982-84), in 1983 Sahnoun also helped set up the Brundtland Commission on sustainable development and the ensuing Rio, Kyoto and Paris conferences and agreements.
The droughts and famines that had led to conflicts across Africa had made him understand the severity of the threat of global warming. “No people can remain isolated, protected in a kind of fortress against the deteriorating living conditions in the rest of humanity,” he said. “We haven’t quite grasped yet that we are all in the same boat. Some live in staterooms, others in the hold, but when the ship goes down it affects us all.”
In 1984 he was appointed Algerian ambassador to the US (serving until 1989), and the following year, when TWA Flight 847 was hijacked shortly after take-off from Athens on its way to San Diego, Sahnoun was involved in negotiations to free the mostly American hostages. His most satisfying task, he said, was mediating the transition of South West Africa into the new country of Namibia in 1990. He renegotiated many colonial straight-line borders which had divided towns and villages.
In 1992 he was named Special Representative of the UN Secretary-general to Somalia. Though he made much progress in bringing peace to that war-torn state, his efforts were hindered by the Americans’ determination to intervene and a lack of backing from the UN, about which he complained bitterly. “When you drop a vase and it breaks into three pieces, you take the pieces and put it back together,” he later observed. “What do you do when the vase shatters into a thousand pieces?”
Sahnoun and his boss, Boutros Boutros-ghali, the UN Secretarygeneral, were at loggerheads over Somalia. Sahnoun’s work was warmly praised to Boutros-ghali by the likes of Henry Kissinger, the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and the Irish President, Mary Robinson; Boutrosghali was incensed, Sahnoun recalled – jealous of his Special Envoy.
He called in Sahnoun and demanded that he resign. In October 1992 Sahnoun did so, giving a tearful press conference at which he said: “I’m disappointed by what I found to be a lack of support, not just from the Secretary-general but from the UN system as a whole.” The aftermath was tragic: the US intervened in Somalia and much blood was shed.
Undeterred, Sahnoun also served as a key adviser to the UN in ending the war in Rwanda in the early 1990s, as well as working on the war between Sudan and the rebels in the south of the country. He and others eventually engineered a peace accord in 2005.
Boutros-ghali stood down in 1997 when the US vetoed his reappointment. When a journalist friend asked Sahnoun if he would stand for the post, he turned to her and said: “I thought you were a friend of mine! You know I can achieve more if I don’t have to do a job like that.”
Instead, he lobbied successfully for Kofi Annan, with whom he enjoyed much better relations. Annan set up a programme of UN reform, and Sahnoun co-chaired the committee which led to the transformation of the UN Right to Intervene – which had damaging effects, notably in Somalia – into the Responsibility to Protect.
In 2008, with Cornelio Sommaruga, former International President of the Red Cross, Sahnoun launched the Caux Forum for Human Security. “Insecurity is born of fear,” he said. “We must look to the root causes of that fear, and address it with far more energy and cohesion.” At Caux, on Lake Geneva, young people from across the world came together and learned to listen.
His sister, Aicha, cared for him in his later years in Geneva and Algeria. Mohamed Sahnoun married, first, Naima Bachtarzi; they had a son and a daughter. He married, secondly, Samia Gharbi, with whom he had a son. His children survive him.