Javier Pérez de Cuéllar
Born: January 19th, 1920
Died: March 4th, 2020
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a reluctant compromise choice for UN secretary-general who astonished the diplomatic world by brokering peace agreements in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as the cold war thawed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, died on Wednesday, according to the Peruvian foreign ministry. He was 100.
Pérez de Cuéllar might have stepped out of a dusty 19th-century history book: an obscure, old-school career envoy who had long represented his native Peru at the UN and at embassies in Europe and South America without making waves. Diplomatic colleagues called him competent but colourless.
In December 1981, however, the Security Council ended a six-week deadlock by naming him the world organisation’s fifth secretary-general – the first from Latin America, and “everyone’s last choice”, as one delegate put it. No one expected much, least of all Pérez de Cuéllar, who admitted he was “not considered the most exciting candidate”.
As cold war tensions eased, he brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the bargaining table at the UN to work on their long-standing regional conflicts
But in two terms, from 1982 through 1991, he helped end a 10-year war between Iran and Iraq; secured the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan; wound down conflicts in Cambodia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and shepherded Namibia to independence from South Africa. His UN peacekeepers won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize for work in Mozambique and Angola.
Unable to persuade President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to withdraw his forces from neighbouring Kuwait, Pérez de Cuéllar failed to avert the Persian Gulf War in 1990. But as cold war tensions eased, he brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the bargaining table at the UN to work on their long-standing regional conflicts.
And when he stepped down in 1991, he was showered with honours. Queen Elizabeth II bestowed an honorary knighthood. President François Mitterrand awarded him France’s Legion of Honour. President George HW Bush gave him the US’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, hailing him for presiding over a “rebirth” of the UN, “where co-operation in reaching common goals is replacing rhetoric and division”.
Skilful mediator
Pérez de Cuéllar’s achievements owed much to those who helped ease tensions: Bush, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, South African leaders FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, and many others. But at the helm of a world body of limited enforcement powers, Pérez de Cuéllar was praised as a skilful mediator whose persuasiveness and good timing achieved results unthinkable only a few years earlier.
Diplomats who had once greeted his selection and prospects with scepticism also saluted him for restoring prestige to the office of secretary-general, which had been tarnished with disclosures that his predecessor, Kurt Waldheim, had hidden his complicity in Nazi war crimes during the second World War.
The New York Times, in an editorial, said Pérez de Cuéllar’s tenure had “coincided with the erosion of old ideologies and repressive empires”, adding: “It opened the way for human rights breakthroughs in countries like Cuba and Iran, once immune from scrutiny. And it helped transform the General Assembly into something resembling a global parliament.”
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar y de la Guerra was born in Lima, Peru, on January 19th, 1920, the son of a prosperous businessman whose ancestors had migrated from Spain in the 16th century. His father died when he was four. He learned French from a governess and earned a law degree from the Catholic University of Lima in 1943. He joined Peru’s diplomatic service in 1944 and was soon posted to France.
In Paris he married Yvette Roberts, and they had a son, Francisco, and a daughter, Agueda Cristina. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1975 he married Marcela Temple Seminario.
Pérez de Cuéllar became a member of Peru’s delegation to the first UN General Assembly, held in London in 1946. He was later named first secretary of embassies in Britain, Bolivia and Brazil, and the ambassador to Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Poland and Venezuela.
Troubleshooter
He was named Peru’s permanent representative to the UN in 1971, led its delegation in the General Assembly until 1975, sat on the Security Council in 1973-1974 and was the council’s president in 1974. He was later a troubleshooter for secretary-general Kurt Waldheim in Cyprus, Afghanistan and other hot spots. Waldheim named him undersecretary for special political affairs in 1978.
Pérez de Cuéllar resigned in 1981 and went home, expecting to be named ambassador to Brazil. But the senate in Peru refused to ratify his appointment, and President Fernando Belaúnde Terry began campaigning for his election as UN secretary-general. Pérez de Cuéllar refused to declare his candidacy or even return to New York to lobby for the post.
Under the UN Charter, the 15-member Security Council chooses secretary-generals – General Assembly approval is rubber-stamped – and in 1981 the contest came down to two candidates: Waldheim, who was strongly backed by the Soviet Union but only tepidly by the United States and other western nations, and Salim Ahmed Salim, Tanzania’s foreign minister, who was supported by China and radical developing nations.
After 16 ballots over six weeks, the council was still deadlocked, with the Soviet Union vetoing Waldheim and the United States blocking Salim. Both men stood aside, and Pérez de Cuéllar, a figure from an emerging nation who had western attributes, was the compromise among nine candidates – “the least objectionable”, one delegate said. Pérez de Cuéllar had sat out the balloting at a beach house near Lima.
Inauspicious start
His first five-year term was inauspicious, with the Soviet army fighting in Afghanistan, with Iran and Iraq at war, and with civil wars raging in Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique and Angola. But he persuaded the five permanent Security Council members – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China – to meet regularly on common problems.
Most of his achievements came in his second term, from 1987 to 1991, when the Soviet collapse opened doors for East-West co-operation
In 1986 he recovered from quadruple-bypass heart surgery in time to run for re-election.
Most of his achievements came in his second term, from 1987 to 1991, when the Soviet collapse opened doors for East-West co-operation, which he exploited diplomatically. In 1988 he negotiated a ceasefire that ended the Iran-Iraq war, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and Namibia’s independence, which became effective in 1990.
In 1989 he helped negotiate ceasefires in civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and launched the Paris peace talks that in 1991 led to a comprehensive settlement in Cambodia, which had been wracked by genocidal horrors in the 1970s and civil wars in the 1980s. The peace accords he nurtured between El Salvador’s government and leftist rebels were completed in his last minutes in office on December 31st, 1991. – New York Times