LED UN IN TURBULENT 1980S
‘IF I WANT TO BE EFFECTIVE, I HAVE TO BE DISCREET’
HE WAS MORE INCLINED TOWARD THE WORK THAT GOES UNSEEN, SOMETIMES ONE- ON- ONE WITH DIFFICULT INTERLOCUTORS. ‘LET ME DO IT,’ HE WOULD TELL ME, ‘I HAVE MY WILES.’ ... ‘LET JAVIER DO IT’ CAME UP OFTEN IN UN CORRIDORS. — ALVARO DE SOTO, FORMER UN DIPLOMAT
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the softspoken Peruvian diplomat who led the United Nations as its fifth secretary- general through bitter confrontation with the U. S. Congress during the Reagan administration to a period of unprecedented peacemaking that coincided with the end of the Cold War, died March 4 at his home in Lima. He was 100.
Peru’s Foreign Ministry, which announced the death, did not disclose a cause.
Pérez de Cuéllar, 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 re- election, 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 did win the Nobel Peace Prize under Pérez de Cuéllar’s 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 United States 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 Pérez de Cuéllar seized on the thaw to pursue peace agreements in places like El Salvador, and to help shape postwar settlements in Namibia and Cambodia. Ironically, the “new world order” Pérez de Cuéllar assiduously promoted culminated with a UN- sanctioned, U. S.- led military conflict against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. It was a conflict he sought unsuccessfully to avert.
“Pérez de Cuéllar took an organization that had almost selfdestructed 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 R. Ford’s UN ambassador.
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar de la Guerra was born in Lima on Jan. 19, 1920. He was four when his father, a wealthy businessman, died. He graduated with a law degree from Catholic University in Lima and took his first job in the Peruvian foreign service as a $50-a-month 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 as Peru’s ambassador to Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Venezuela, France and the UN.
Pérez de Cuéllar joined the UN in 1975 as then-secretary-general Kurt Waldheim’s special representative for Cyprus, where the Peruvian diplomat launched negotiations between the island’s Greek president Makarios and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash. While the standoff has persisted for more than 45 years, Pérez de Cuéllar considered his effort to prevent a bloody clash between the two sides his “principal diplomatic achievement.”
In 1979, Waldheim promoted Pérez de Cuéllar to undersecretary- general for special political affairs, where he fruitlessly pressed the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan. He was selected secretary-general in December 1981 as a compromise candidate after Waldheim, running for a third term, deadlocked with Tanzania’s Salim Ahmed Salim.
Pérez de Cuéllar received fewer votes than some other candidates, but prevailed because he was the only one who didn’t get vetoed.
Other stories in major newspapers noted that Pérez de Cuéllar, a descendant of Spanish nobility, was all “old world cultivation and charm” with a dry wit but little spine. “Many observers believe the secretary-general will preside over the collapse of the United Nations,” the Times of London reported.
Pérez de Cuéllar’s first term was marked by painful setbacks, including unsuccessful efforts on the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, to end the civil war in Lebanon or to negotiate a peace deal between Britain and Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War. Pérez de Cuéllar’s relations with the Reagan administration were strained, and the U. S. withdrew in 1984 from the UNESCO.
Pérez de Cuéllar underwent quadruple heart- bypass surgery in July 1986, after suffering chest pains. Following a swift recovery, the members of the Security Council paid him a visit and asked that he serve a second fiveyear term, beginning in 1987.
His second term coincided with the arrival of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and a series of political and economic reforms known as “perestroika,” which created unexpected opportunities for political co- operation between the two superpowers, and for the UN.
Pérez de Cuéllar oversaw a string of 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 civilized 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.
Marrack Goulding, Pérez de Cuéllar’s British peacekeeping adviser, faulted his former boss for excessive secrecy, saying he regularly withheld vital communications with world leaders from the Security Council and his own senior advisers.
Alvaro De Soto, a Peruvian diplomat who was recruited by Pérez de Cuéllar to serve at the UN, once recalled his former boss as a man who thrived in the shadows: “He was more inclined toward the work that goes unseen, sometimes one- on- one with difficult interlocutors. ‘ Let me do it,’ he would tell me, ‘I have my wiles.’ As his efforts began to bear fruit, the words ‘ Let Javier do it’ came up often in UN corridors.”
“The Pérez de Cuéllar decade peaked dramatically, at the stroke of midnight on the last day of his mandate, on the last day of 1991, with the initialling of what was to become, a couple of weeks later, the El Salvador Peace Accord, ending a twelve-year war,” wrote de Soto, who led the UN’S peace negotiations for El Salvador. “A week later when I advised his (successor), Egypt’s Boutros Boutros- Ghali, to attend the formal signature of the Accord in Mexico on 16 January 1992, his first reaction was that he would feel like a usurper — ‘Javier should go.’ I dutifully conveyed this idea to Javier. Needless to say, he declined, albeit ever so politely. That was the fifth secretary-general of the United Nations. That is Javier.”
Pérez de Cuéllar’s first marriage, to Yvette Roberts, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Marcela Temple. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush presented Pérez de Cuéllar with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U. S.’s highest civilian honour. Since his UN retirement, Pérez de Cuéllar 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 as its ambassador to France.