In a post-war era full of revolutions, regional disputes and conflict in the Cold War, obscured by fear of an East-West nuclear burn, Mr. Urquhart deployed and led his light-armed peacekeepers in war zones in the Middle East, Congo, Southern Africa. Kashmir, Cyprus and other places. They were sometimes unable to defuse explosive situations, but often succeeded in relieving tensions and helping refugees.
“The United Nations may have long since been sidelined when it comes to the political ordering of the world,” Madeleine G. Kalb wrote in a 1982 New York Times Magazine profile of Urquhart. ‘But the United Nations has unquestionably achieved one proud success – peacekeeping in conflicts where the important interests of the major powers were not directly involved. ”
As the crisis negotiator in the war shooting, he was often in danger. In Congo, in 1961, trying to subjugate a separatist province of Katanga, he was abducted, detained for hours and beaten by rebel troops and beaten with rifles, until Katanga’s president, Moise Tshombe, intervened to save his life.
By 1986, when Mr. Retired from Urquhart, he led 13 peacekeeping operations, recruited 10,000 troops from 23 countries, and established peacekeeping as one of the United Nations’ most visible and politically popular functions. In an editorial, The New York Times praised him as a visionary soldier of peace.
“Mr. Urquhart continues to believe that the Soviet Union and the United States may still find it in their interest to participate in peace operations that may contain local conflicts,” the editorial said. “As Mr. Urquhart reflects in his life service, ‘Why would not the lion sometimes lie with the lion, instead of fearing all the lambs by their mutual hostility? ‘
The UN peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.
Brian Edward Urquhart was born on 28 February 1919 in the south west of England, in the town of Bridport, one of two sons of Murray and Bertha (Rendall) Urquhart. His father left the family when he was 7 years old. His mother taught at the Badminton School in Bristol, and with his brother Andrew at another school, she enrolled Brian as the only boy among 200 girls there. One of his classmates was Indira Nehru, who became Prime Minister Indira Ghandi of India.
He studied at Westminster School in London in 1937. After two years at Oxford University, he joined the British Army when World War II began in 1939. During training camp in 1942, his parachute partially failed in the last moments of a jump; he remembers looking at his “tulip shape” as he plunged into a plowed field. He was seriously injured and said he would never walk again. But within a year he rejoined his unit and performed in North Africa and Sicily.