Sir Marrack Goulding obituary

Sir Marrack Goulding, who has died aged 73 of cancer, presided over a very large expansion of United Nations peacekeeping operations in troublespots around the world as cold war tensions eased. When Goulding arrived at the UN in 1986 to take charge of its peacekeeping activities, the world body was running five such operations, monitoring truces and ceasefires mainly in Cyprus and the Middle East, and had 10,000 blue-helmeted soldiers loaned by member states under its command. But as relations between the Soviet Union and the west improved, it became possible to wind down many regional crises. Demand grew rapidly for UN forces to perform such essential services for the creation of permanent peace settlements as disarming warring factions, overseeing political agreements, guarding relief supplies and supervising elections. By 1993 "Mig" Goulding was running 13 peacekeeping operations in countries that included Angola, Mozambique and Yugoslavia, and parts of Central America, and had 55,000 "blue helmets" under his command. During this period the UN saw its peacekeeping budget grow from $240m a year to $2.7bn. In 1988 these efforts won international acclaim when the UN peacekeeping forces were collectively awarded the Nobel peace prize. During his peacekeeping years, Goulding carried the title of under-secretary general for special political affairs, which had been dreamed up for his British predecessor, Sir Brian Urquhart, who, along with his American colleague Ralph Bunche, was credited with having invented the UN peacekeeping role. The studied vagueness of this job description was intended to soothe the Soviet Union, which periodically condemned peacekeeping as illegal in cold war days, since it is not provided for anywhere in the UN charter – which leaves the organisation with an uncomfortable choice between persuading belligerents to settle disputes peacefully, or using force itself to end the fighting. However, in 1993 the UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali split the job in two, giving responsibility for overseeing day-to-day peacekeeping activities to Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian who was later to become secretary general himself, and moving Goulding to the newly created position of under-secretary general for political affairs, where he stayed until his retirement from the organisation in 1997. The secretary general's stated intent was to strengthen the UN's ability to promote peace through quiet diplomacy behind the scenes. But in practice, it proved difficult to separate the political management of a crisis from military efforts to enforce a solution, and the two departments found themselves frequently treading on each other's toes. In Peacemonger (2002), his account of his peacekeeping years, Goulding says that, to preserve personal good relations, he and Annan had to instruct their subordinates to settle all interdepartmental disputes at a subordinate level, never letting them reach the top. For those, such as myself, who knew Goulding during his UN years, he often seemed a somewhat stiff and remote figure. He was admired for his intelligence by Boutros-Ghali, but his relations with the broader UN staff, which contains both high achievers and their opposite, were not always easy. He delighted in puncturing UN gobbledegook – talking openly of the Turkish "invasion" of Cyprus, when it was usually described as an "intervention", and of the Khmer Rouge's "genocide" in Cambodia when the politically correct phrase was "the policies and practices of the past". Similarly, he delighted in such examples of UN English as "diplomatic day marches", "respecting the higherarchy" and "inchmeal" progress. Goulding was also a fanatical bird-watcher. His field visits to faraway peacekeeping headquarters, to say nothing of the local embassies of important countries, were often dreaded by those who knew they would be asked to accompany him on a dawn bird patrol. In the end, the peacekeeping "explosion" over which Goulding presided turned out to be just that – an explosion that blew itself out. The loss of 17 US Rangers on a mission in Somalia that the UN had never authorised soured the views of the US administration and Congress on peacekeeping. So did the UN's failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 after its forces there had been tipped off about what was coming, and the reluctance of the Europeans to sanction American military assistance for the beleaguered Bosnians in Sarajevo. The UN "blue helmets" briefly topped 75,000 during Annan's tenure, and the peacekeeping budget touched $3bn. But by 2000, its peacekeeping forces numbered fewer than 19,000. The Goulding boom was over. Born in Plymouth, Goulding was educated at St Paul's school, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first in classics. After joining the Foreign Office and studying Arabic, he served in Kuwait, Tripoli and Cairo. A spell back in London followed, and after serving in Lisbon he joined the British UN Mission in New York, where he was involved in an attempt, sanctioned by Margaret Thatcher, to avoid a war with Argentina over the Falklands by putting the islands under UN administration while sovereignty was negotiated. But in the end the Argentinian junta rejected the plan. From 1983 until 1985 Goulding served as ambassador to Angola, where he was involved in the ultimately successful negotiations to persuade Cuba to withdraw its mercenaries from the civil war there and the efforts to convince South Africa to accept the UN plan for the independence of Namibia. He was appointed CMG in 1983, KCMG in 1997. After leaving the UN, he served as warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, from 1997 until 2006. His first marriage, to Susan d'Albiac, was dissolved in 1996. They had two sons, Henry and James, and a daughter, Rachel, who survive him, along with nine grandchildren. A second marriage, to Catherine Pawlow, was dissolved in 2004. • Marrack Irvine Goulding, diplomat, born 2 September 1936; died 9 July 2010