Ex-UN chief Javier Perez de Cuellar dies
He helped broker a ceasefire between Iran and Iraq in 1988
Javier Perez de Cuellar, the two-term United Nations secretary-general who brokered a historic cease-fire between Iran and Iraq in 1988 and who in later life came out of retirement to help re-establish democracy in his Peruvian homeland, has died. He was 100.
His son, Francisco Perez de Cuellar, said his father died Wednesday at home of natural causes. Current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the Peruvian diplomat a ‘personal inspiration’. “Mr. Perez de Cuellar’s life spanned not only a century but also the entire history of the United Nations, dating back to his participation in the first meeting of the General Assembly in 1946,” Guterres said in a statement late on Wednesday.
Perez de Cuellar’s death ends a long diplomatic career that brought him full-circle from his first posting as secretary at the Peruvian embassy in Paris in 1944 to his later job as Peru’s ambassador to France.
When he began his tenure as UN secretary-general on January 1, 1982, he was a little-known Peruvian who was a compromise candidate at a time when the United Nations was held in low esteem.
Serving as UN undersecretary-general for special political affairs, he emerged as the dark horse candidate in December 1981 after a six-week election deadlock between U.N. chief Kurt Waldheim and Tanzanian
Foreign Minister Salim Ahmed Salim. Once elected, he quickly made his mark.
Disturbed by the United Nations’ dwindling effectiveness, he sought to revitalize the world body’s faulty peacekeeping machinery.
His first step was to “shake the house” with a highly critical report in which he warned: “We are perilously near to a new international anarchy.”
With the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and with conflicts raging in Afghanistan and Cambodia and between Iran and Iraq, he complained to the General Assembly that U.N. resolutions “are increasingly defied or ignored by those that feel themselves strong enough to do so.”