Benon Sevan, Former Deputy UN Secretary General, Dies

As a small boy, he spent his childhood locked within the Venetian walls of old Nicosia in a mixed Armenian-Turkish neighborhood named Arab Ahmet.

Sevan said that the Armenians of Arab Ahmet lived very closely with their Turkish Cypriot neighbors.

“There was no discrimination, no animosity in our lives. We all lived together. I always want to pay tribute to my grandparents for this. After what had happened to them in Turkey, they had every justification to hate Turks but they didn’t. We grew up like brothers and sisters.”

The two first languages Sevan learnt in his life then were Armenian and Turkish. He started learning Greek only when he went to school and later incorporated the language along with the six other languages he spoke having been educated later at the Melkonian Institute.

Passionate about photography since childhood, Sevan started taking pictures for newspapers at the weekends to earn additional income. He also landed a job as research assistant to India’s former ambassador to the UN, Arthur Lall.

His next job provided him with another learning opportunity. In 1965, on the cusp of graduating, the 28-year-old Sevan joined the photo section of the Radio and Visual Services Division at United Nations headquarters which opened a lot of doors for him.

Sevan loved the place so much that he learned the local language, married a young Balinese woman who, when his job finished in 1972, took back to New York.

He recalled how he wrote to his aunts in Nicosia who had been pressing him to get married, and told them that he had finally done so but the marriage was not to last long as she could not adjust to New York. They always remained in touch, however.

On returning to New York, he began steadily climbing the UN career ladder, including carrying out special political assignments on behalf of the Secretary-General. In 1980, he married his second wife, Micheline, also a UN employee. They had one daughter, Jasmine. Micheline passed away several years ago.

The Oil-for-Food programme, he said, was executed during a crucial period when everybody thought that once the Soviets withdrew there would finally be peace.

However, he said seeing how the regional conflict still was well into the 21st century, all efforts to change its destiny had failed.

As the head of the Oil-for-Food Programme, he found himself at the centre of an emerging scandal in the mid-2000s and the only time in his lengthy career that his work was scrutinized as part of a wider investigation focusing on kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime that involved several coalition countries involved in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Sevan was always candid when discussing the investigation that ultimately ended his UN career. He believed it was a US tactic to target the UN – which had opposed the invasion – in order to divert attention from the disaster of its own making in Iraq.

He had also survived the infamous suicide bombing attack on the Canal Hotel in Iraq in 2003 in which 22 UN staff members were killed, simply because he changed the place of his meeting a minute before the bomb exploded. Sevan said he felt guilty for having survived when his friends and colleagues were killed.

After leaving the UN, Benon Sevan led a quiet life of retirement in Cyprus but always maintained an active interest in the UN and in the Cyprus issue.