The Ecuadorian UN envoy who shuttled through six years of Geneva talks to frame the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan
Gorbachev decided to withdraw 'because of perestroika and diplomacy,' he later wrote in his memoir, 'reinforced by military pressure': not because of Stinger missiles alone.
Cordovez was an Ecuadorian diplomat and UN Under-Secretary-General who, as Pérez de Cuéllar's Personal Representative on Afghanistan from 1982, spent six years shuttling between the Pakistani and Afghan delegations in Geneva to broker the accords that framed the Soviet withdrawal. He entered the UN in 1963 as part of Raúl Prebisch's team that founded UNCTAD, rose to head the ECOSOC secretariat, and handled crises from the Iran hostage affair to the Iran-Iraq war. The Geneva Accords were signed on 14 April 1988; Cordovez, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, later served as Ecuador's foreign minister and UN ambassador.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1935.11.03Born in Quito, Ecuador
- 1962Law degree with honors, University of Chile; admitted to the bar
- 1963Joined the UN; helped Raúl Prebisch found UNCTAD
- 1978UN Assistant Secretary-General for Economic and Social Matters
- 1981–1988Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs; Personal Representative of the Secretary-General on Afghanistan
- 1988.04.14Brokered the signing of the Geneva Accords, framing the Soviet withdrawal
- 1988–1992Foreign Minister of Ecuador
- 2005–2007Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the UN
Related historical events
A Second UN Chapter: Reckoning and the Cyprus Mission
After finishing his term as Ecuador's foreign minister, Cordovez's activity split into two strands: reckoning with his own experience as a party to the Afghanistan negotiations, and returning to the UN as a mediator. In 1992 he was appointed Diplomat-in-Residence at Columbia University in New York, and he also served on the board of the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Co-operation, as president of the World Trade Center of Ecuador, and as special counsel at the New York international law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene and MacRae. In this period he published, with the journalist Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (Oxford University Press, 1995). The book confronted the conventional American account that Soviet troops had been hounded out of the mountains by U.S.-armed guerrillas, arguing that the Red Army was securely entrenched when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw. Written by a participant in the talks, it became a reference point in international debate over how to interpret the Geneva Accords.
In April 1997 Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Cordovez Special Adviser to the Secretary-General, following the decision of Han Sung-Joo of the Republic of Korea not to continue as the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Cyprus beyond 30 April 1997. Annan stated his determination to press ahead with an intensified effort toward a comprehensive settlement of the Cyprus issue, and Cordovez's primary task was to prepare the next rounds of the inter-communal talks and assist the Secretary-General in chairing them. Accompanied by Cordovez, the Secretary-General met the permanent members of the Security Council on 12 March 1998; the Council expressed concern at high tension on the island and called on both sides to move the process forward. Visiting the island from 18 to 22 March, Cordovez met Glafcos Clerides twice and Rauf Denktash three times. Clerides reiterated his readiness to resume direct talks under the Secretary-General's auspices on the basis of the relevant Security Council resolutions, while Denktash set out the view that a new approach was needed, based on 'acknowledgment of the existence of two fully functioning democratic States on the island'. Cordovez also carried letters from the Secretary-General and was received in Ankara and Athens. No agreement followed: the Secretary-General recorded that all these efforts had not proved sufficient to lead to a resumption of the process. The mediator who had succeeded on Afghanistan thus left Cyprus without a settlement.