Heartbeat:
‘He Made Service Look Effortless’
By Shashi Tharoor

The peerless Cyrus Vance will, among his many accomplishments, be remembered for his extraordinary efforts on behalf of the United Nations to bring peace to the former Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s. I travelled with him to the region in October 1991, when as Special Envoy of Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar he negotiated the arrangements that created the UN peacekeeping operations there.

In addition to the qualities of patience and skill described by so many obituarists, Cy Vance revealed a level of tireless energy that shamed those of us half his age. I remember somewhat ruefully the punishing schedule he set for himself, bounding off a transcontinental flight in the morning straight into a meeting, going through a full day of negotiations without a break (since lunches were also working sessions) and concluding late in the evening with what he called a “hot wash-up”, where his staff evaluated the day’s progress. He was then invariably up for a 6 a.m. start.

Cy Vance belonged to a generation that served and that made service look effortless, but he put in a great deal of hard work to pull off his many successes. He later co-chaired, with Lord Owen, the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia, preparing the Vance-Owen Peace Plan. His quiet diplomacy, on behalf of the UN, between Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia also deserves to be honoured.

Like the best American statesmen, he recognized that it is in America’s interests to tend to the conflicts that bedevil the rest of the world, and to do so through the one indispensable global institution, the United Nations.

Shashi Tharoor (far right), Interim Head of the UN Department of Public Information, led the team on the former Yugoslavia in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, between 1991 and 1996. He is seen in this picture while on mission to the region with Mr. Vance (far left).