Two-term United Nations Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, 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 Pérez de Cuéllar, said his father died Wednesday at home of natural causes. Current U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the Peruvian diplomat a “personal inspiration.”
“Mr. Pérez de Cuéllar’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,” said Guterres in a statement late Wednesday.
Pérez de Cuéllar married the former Marcela Temple. He had a son, Francisco, and a daughter, Cristina, by a previous marriage. His funeral will be held Friday. 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.
When he began his tenure as U.N. secretary-general on Jan. 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 U.N. 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.”
“The problem with the United Nations is that either it’s not used or misused by member countries,” he said in an interview at the end of his first year as U.N. secretary general.
During his decade as U.N. chief, Pérez de Cuéllar would earn a reputation more for diligent, quiet diplomacy than charisma.
“Le ton fait la chanson,” he was fond of saying, meaning that melody is what makes the song and not the loudness of the singer.