Two-term U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who brokered a historic cease-fire between Iran and Iraq in 1988, is dead at 100.
FILE - In this Mar. 28, 2001 file photo, Foreign Minister Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, speaks to reporters during a pause in the session of the annual meeting of ministers from the Latin American Group of Rio and the European Union in Santiago, Chile. The former UN Secretary Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar has died in Lima, Peru, on Wednesday, March 4, 2020.
Pérez de Cuéllar’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. 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.”
“He has an amiable look about him that people mistake for through and through softness,” said an aide, who described him as tough and courageous. Upset with what he viewed as member states’ reluctance to pitch in to help the world body out of a financial crisis, he told the New York Times in September 1986, “I don’t see any reason why I should preside over the collapse of the organization.”
“When I can, I read everything but United Nations documents,” Pérez de Cuéllar confided to a reporter. Once on a flight to Moscow, an aide observed that “in the midst of it all, the secretary-general had time for splendid literature.
In Peru, the family belonged to the educated rather than the landowning class. “He went to the right schools,” a countryman at the United Nations once said of Pérez de Cuéllar. At the age of 80, Pérez de Cuéllar emerged from retirement in Paris and returned to Peru to take on the mantle of foreign minister and cabinet chief for provisional President Valentin Paniagua.
After a brief stint as Peru’s ambassador to Venezuela, he returned to the United Nations in 1979 as undersecretary-general for special political affairs. In that capacity, he undertook delicate diplomatic missions to Indochina and Afghanistan.
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