Former U.N. Chief and Peruvian Diplomat Javier Pérez de Cuellar Dies at Age 100 | 2020-03-11 22:27:43 (Visits: 540 Times) |  | | Former U.N. General-Secretary Javier Perez de Cuellar delivers a speech commemorating the 15th anniversary of the peace accord in San Salvador, El Salvador on Jan. 16, 2007. Marlon GOMEZ—AFP/Getty Images
BY FRANKLIN BRICENO / AP MARCH 4, 2020
(LIMA, Peru) — Javier Pérez 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, died Wednesday, Peru’s foreign ministry said. He was 100.
His son, Francisco Pérez de Cuellar, said his father died at home of natural causes. Javier Pérez de Cuellar was “an outstanding Peruvian, a full-bodied democrat, who dedicated his life and work to making our country great,” tweeted Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra.
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 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, Perez de Cuellar 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.
“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.
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