Peruvian politician and diplomat who served for two terms as the UN secretary general and helped to end the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.
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 president 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. Läs artikel