In a post-war era filled with revolutions, regional disputes and Cold War conflicts, obscured by fears of an East-West nuclear conflagration, Mr. Urquhart deployed and often led his lightly armed soldiers to war zones in the Middle East , Congo, southern Africa Kashmir, Cyprus and other places. Sometimes they were unable to neutralize explosive situations, but often they were able to ease tensions and help refugees.
“The United Nations may have been pushed aside a long time ago when it came to the political order of the world,” wrote Madeleine G. Kalb in an Urquhart profile in the New York Times Magazine in 1982. “Still, the United Nations was. it undeniably had great success – peacekeeping in conflicts where the vital interests of the great powers were not directly involved. “
As a war crisis negotiator, he was often in danger. In Congo in 1961, trying to subdue a separatist province of Katanga, he was kidnapped, held for hours and trampled and beaten with rifles by rebel troops, until Katanga President Moise Tshombe intervened to save his life.
In 1986, when Mr. Urquhart retired, he ran 13 peacekeeping operations, recruited a force of 10,000 soldiers from 23 countries and established peacekeeping as one of the most visible and politically popular functions of the United Nations. In an editorial, The New York Times hailed him as a visionary peace soldier.
“Sir. Urquhart insists on believing that the Soviet Union and the United States may still feel that it is in their interest to participate in peacekeeping operations that may contain local conflicts,” said the editorial. “As Mr. Urquhart asks as he reflects about the service of his life, ‘Why would the lion sometimes not lie with the lion, instead of terrorizing all the lambs with their mutual hostility?’ ”
UN peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.
Brian Edward Urquhart was born on February 28, 1919, in the south west of England, in the city of Bridport, one of the two sons of Murray and Bertha (Rendall) Urquhart. His father left the family when he was 7 years old. Her mother taught at Badminton School in Bristol and, with her brother Andrew at a school elsewhere, she enrolled Brian as the only boy among 200 girls there. One of her classmates was Indira Nehru, who became Prime Minister Indira Ghandi of India.
He graduated from Westminster School in London in 1937. After two years at Oxford University, he joined the British Army when World War II started in 1939. During the training camp in 1942, his parachute failed partially in the last moments a jump; he remembers looking at his “tulip shape” while diving into a plowed field. Severely injured, he was told he could never walk again. But within a year he returned to his unit and took action in North Africa and Sicily.