Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who has died aged 100, was a cautious and conservative Peruvian diplomat who became the secretary general of the United Nations for two terms during a difficult and dismal decade from 1982. He also served, briefly, as prime minister of Peru in 2000-01.
As secretary general, Pérez de Cuéllar faced a series of global crises, including the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent Gulf war, and he had to deal with the difficulties caused by the permanent hostility of the Ronald Reagan administration to the UN, as well as the consequent failure of the Americans to pay their dues.
His specific triumphs, which came in his second term, as relations between the Soviet Union and the US thawed, were to help end the war between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988) and to preside over a peace settlement in El Salvador. During that time he also secured the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and mediated Namibian independence from South Africa.
Pérez de Cuéllar took up the role in January 1982, with an in-tray full to overflowing: Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1978; the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979; the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini the same year had provoked the Americans and created the conditions for the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, and Argentina was about to invade the Falkland Islands.
Yet in all these international dramas the UN was involved only peripherally. No new peacekeeping operations were started between 1978 and 1988, and for much of Pérez de Cuéllar’s early period in office there was not much that he could do.
The entire UN system was under attack from conservative governments in the US and Britain. During his first three years as secretary general, the US representative in New York was Jeane Kirkpatrick, a woman with strong views about the need to support military dictators friendly to the west, and positively hostile to the developing nations’ majority in the UN general assembly. Although from Latin America, Pérez de Cuéllar shared many of the views of the western delegates and had little interest in the demands of the developing nations.
The first crisis with which he had to deal occurred unexpectedly in Latin America, with the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982. He later admitted to sympathising with the Argentinian claim, but was so even-handed in his approach that Nicanor Costa Méndez, the Argentinian foreign minister, once said that Pérez de Cuéllar had gone so far in his impartiality as to be disadvantageous for Argentina.
It was during the Falklands crisis that Pérez de Cuéllar learned that only when all other options had run out would the US cede place to the UN. He was telephoned on the first day by Alexander Haig, the US secretary of state, to be told that the US would take the lead in seeking a solution, and for a month he was obliged to twiddle his thumbs, almost wholly ignorant of the peace negotiations under way.
Only when Haig’s month-long efforts proved fruitless could Pérez de Cuéllar spring into action and even then he was obliged to work without a specific security council mandate. What became known as the Peruvian initiative, which provided for a UN role in the islands, was dreamed up in Lima rather than in New York. Pérez de Cuéllar ran with it for two days, but it was knocked on the head by the British attack on the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May, and the sinking of the British destroyer HMS Sheffield two days later.
Even before the Argentinians finally surrendered, on 14 June, a new crisis had erupted in the Middle East. On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon for the second time, moving straight through the southern territory where a UN force of 7,000 men had been deployed since the first invasion in 1978. Once again the UN was powerless to act, and Pérez de Cuéllar subsequently wrote bitterly that the actions of those with whom he had to deal at that time “showed a disregard for human life [that] amounted, in some instances, to blatant villainy”. As secretary general, however, he could not identify the villains, and once again his attempts to mediate were sabotaged by the American administration.
Ten days after the Israeli invasion he had his first lunch appointment with Reagan and was disconcerted by the president’s limited knowledge of subjects under discussion. Halfway through the lunch he noticed the small briefing cards that the president was using, hidden behind a flower arrangement on the table. The US strategy in the crisis was to ignore the UN and to send American, rather than UN, troops to Beirut.
Long before they got there, Israel’s Christian allies had massacred Palestinian refugees in their camps at Sabra and Chatila. The following year 241 US troops were killed when a lorry loaded with explosives destroyed their barracks. Pérez de Cuéllar tried vainly to get an international peace conference off the ground, as mandated by the UN general assembly, but he was unable to overcome US and Israeli unwillingness to attend such a conference if the Palestinians were present.
He then began to take a more active interest in the Iran-Iraq war, where UN interest had been kept alive largely through the efforts of Olof Palme, the former Swedish prime minister and UN special representative.
In April 1985 Pérez de Cuéllar travelled to both Iran and Iraq. Yet here again, as a result of the unremitting American hostility to the Khomeini regime in Iran, it was impossible to get any significant action taken by the security council. The permanent members, notably the US, Britain and France, were happily supplying weapons and equipment to one side or the other, or indeed both.
Not until 1987, with Pérez de Cuéllar now in his second term, and with a change in the UN atmosphere caused by the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union, was it possible to get the security council to take an interest in the Iran-Iraq war. Yet the UN-brokered ceasefire, when it came, was more on account of exhaustion on the part of the participants than of any well-meaning intervention.
On 2 August 1990, 10 years after the Iraqi invasion of Iran, Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait. Once again the UN and its secretary general were caught unawares. Pérez de Cuéllar always argued subsequently that had the UN known what the Americans and the Russians were well aware of – that a large Iraqi force was moving towards the Kuwaiti border – he could have secured a security council warning that might have caused Saddam to think twice, and thereby prevented the invasion. Once again, he was kept on the margin of events.
When the first of a series of security council resolutions authorising action against Iraq was being drafted in November, Pérez de Cuéllar was not consulted. According to his own account, James Baker, the US secretary of state, simply came to his office and “ceremoniously handed me cheques totalling more than $185m, covering a portion of the US indebtedness to the UN. The secretary then observed that it was exciting to be involved in making the dream of the UN founders come true.” This buttering-up was followed by flattering visits to Camp David, for a round in the golf buggy with President George Bush.
In practice, Pérez de Cuéllar had no alternative but to bow to the inevitable. As he wrote later, it was “highly likely that the US, plus the other countries that were joined in the coalition, would have undertaken military action to free Kuwait, even had authorisation from the security council to act on its behalf not been forthcoming”.
That was the reality of the situation. Yet there were serious objections to the UN decisions, about which Pérez de Cuéllar was made well aware, not just by the radical members of the security council that voted against the enabling resolution (Cuba and Yemen), but also by many within the UN secretariat itself. “A force over which the UN has little or no influence,” he wrote in his memoirs, “inevitably takes on the identity of its major component, as happened to a large extent in the Gulf.”
Anxious to be seen to be doing something, on 12 January 1991, just three days before the UN ultimatum expired, Pérez de Cuéllar arrived in Baghdad to see Saddam. Yet he had nothing new to offer.
In his memoirs, Pilgrimage for Peace (1997), Pérez de Cuéllar sought to distance himself from the decisions that had been made. “While the battle was waged against Iraq under authorisation of the security council … those in command of the military effort did not consult with the United Nations on strategic objectives or inform the security council directly of the course of military action. General Norman Schwarzkopf was appointed commander of the coalition forces by the US, not by the UN. Unlike General Douglas MacArthur and his successors during the Korean war, he was never designated as a UN commander, nor did he ever report to the UN. The coalition forces bore no UN emblems and the UN flag was not carried.”
Pérez de Cuéllar had a brief moment of resistance to the Americans at the end of the Gulf war when Bush asked the UN to take over the task of coping with the Kurdish refugees moving into Turkey, and returning them to Iraq.
He pointed out, to intense American irritation, that this could not be authorised under existing security council resolutions. A way was found around the difficulty when Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the UN high commissioner for refugees, was authorised to expand his existing mission in Iraq.
If his failure to prevent the Gulf war was a disappointment to Pérez de Cuéllar, he took comfort from his one indubitable success in Central America. There, using the particular skills of Álvaro de Soto, one of his most senior aides, the UN was able to broker a peace deal that brought the war in El Salvador to an end on his last day in office.
UN insiders, such as the former British diplomat Brian Urquhart, perceived Pérez de Cuéllar as “a highly intelligent and civilised man with a wide knowledge of the job”, but others felt that he lacked a cutting edge. One journalist even described him as “consistently unexciting”. Yet his unadventurous manner served to mask considerable ambition.
He was born in Lima into a “comfortable, but not rich” family. His father died when he was four and he was brought up in the Peruvian capital within a close-knit family of cousins. He attended Colegio San Agustín then Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, qualifying as a lawyer and joining the ministry of foreign affairs by the age of 20.
A fluent French speaker, he had his first diplomatic posting at the Peruvian embassy in Paris in 1944. The following year he travelled to London as part of the Peruvian delegation to the preparatory commission of the UN, held at Central Hall, Westminster. Later he followed a conventional diplomatic career path, eventually being appointed as ambassador to Switzerland before returning to the foreign ministry in Lima in the mid-1960s.
In 1968, out of tune with the new radical government led by Gen Juan Velasco Alvarado that had emerged after a military coup d’etat, he was about to leave the foreign ministry when the military offered him a new job. Intent on exploiting the opportunities for independence opened up by the cold war, it had decided to establish closer diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Pérez de Cuéllar was asked to open the first Peruvian embassy in Moscow. His familiarity with Russian diplomats was to be of considerable help at the UN.
Two years later, now anxious for Peru to become a leader among developing nations, the military decided to beef up their representation at the UN. Pérez de Cuéllar was the obvious choice to be the representative in New York, and he stayed there from 1971 to 1975. When Peru was elected on to the security council, he served on two occasions as its president.
He had been contemplating retirement from the diplomatic service when Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary general, persuaded him to join the UN itself. He worked in the first instance, from 1975 to 1977, as Waldheim’s special representative for Cyprus, one of the UN’s permanent troublespots.
After an intervening year as the Peruvian ambassador to Venezuela, Waldheim asked him to be one of the two under-secretary generals for special political affairs. In 1981 he was called back to Lima by the new civilian government, with the prospect of being made ambassador to Brazil, but the senate refused to ratify his appointment. At this humiliating moment, his name was put forward for the job of UN secretary general.
Initially the only two serious candidates to emerge were Waldheim, then seeking a third term and subsequently to be denounced as a Nazi fellow traveller, and Salim Ahmed Salim, the radical Tanzanian foreign minister from Zanzibar.
It was a simple choice between right and left, between a candidate from the economically powerful west and one from the impoverished but numerically powerful developing nations. After 16 rounds of voting in the private sessions of the security council, neither candidate could avoid a veto: Waldheim blocked by the Chinese, Salim by the Americans.
Eventually the two frontrunners were persuaded by the Ugandan president of the security council, Olara Otunnu, to stand aside to allow other candidates to come forward. Half-a-dozen names were thrown into the ring, but all of them attracted a veto from one of the permanent members, except for the almost unknown Pérez de Cuéllar. He was few people’s first choice.
He bridged the gap at the UN by being a candidate from a developing nation who was notably pro-western, but his appointment also continued the well-established UN tradition of finding the most compliant individual for the job. When he came up for re-election five years later, Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, noted caustically but approvingly that “he didn’t cause us any trouble last time”.
He did not seek a third term. In 1991 he received an honorary knighthood and the US presidential medal of freedom, and was succeeded in 1992 by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian who behaved rather more confrontationally with the Americans and, as a result, was rewarded with only a single term.
Pérez de Cuéllar retired to his stamp collection and his CDs, but in 1994 he came to believe that his country needed him. He campaigned in 1995 to be president of Peru against the incumbent Alberto Fujimori.
Starting his campaign by entering the country from Bolivia by train, he moved along the Andean highlands. However, the locals had already given their allegiance to “el Indio” Fujimori and were not impressed by this rather shy, aristocratic old gentleman whose heart lay more in Madrid or New York than in Peru.
He went to Paris as ambassador but was recalled to Lima in November 2000, when he was required to take over as president of the council of ministers (effectively the Peruvian prime minister) after Fujimori’s resignation over corruption charges. He remained in that role until July 2001, when he returned to the French capital, retiring in 2004.
He had two children, Francisco and Agueda Cristina, from his first marriage, to Yvette Roberts, which ended in divorce. In 1975 he married Marcela Temple Seminario in 1975; she died in 2013.
• Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, diplomat and politician, born 19
