A Nearly 6-Year Effort for Cordovez : Determination Paid Off for U.N. Mediator

He has been described as pompous, vain and flippant, but even the strongest critics of U.N. envoy Diego Cordovez acknowledge that he is certainly determined.

By the time he announced the Afghan settlement Friday, five years, nine months and 23 days had passed since he first sat down with Afghan and Pakistani negotiators in June, 1982.

At the time, he was viewed as a hopeless optimist grappling with impossible problems.

“It has happened that everybody has given up except myself,” Cordovez, 52, told the Associated Press recently. “Not to give up is my duty.”

Since he began his marathon effort, Cordovez and the talks he supervised have survived four Soviet and two Afghan leaders, a transformation of Pakistan’s political system and changes of delegation leaders to the Geneva talks.

During the often tedious process, Pakistanis and Afghans have uttered not a single word to each other across a negotiating table: It has all been done through Cordovez. Because Pakistan has refused to recognize the Soviet-supported Kabul government, the talks have been conducted indirectly.

At first, neither delegation would enter the Palace of Nations, where the talks have been conducted here, while the other was still inside.

Two years later, progress was made. The two delegations agreed to sit in separate rooms about 50 feet apart on the second floor of the palace, so that Cordovez could shuttle between them.

Gradually, relentlessly, the seemingly insurmountable issues were resolved. The proposed duration of a Soviet troop withdrawal, for example, began at 43 months, but was gradually reduced to an agreed nine months.

Through it all, Cordovez let reporters know that he read what they wrote. Recently, he ventured into the ground-floor newsroom of the palace to complain about the pessimistic tone of the reporting on the talks.

And once last month he called a news conference to inform the media that there is no accent mark in the spelling of his name, then proceeded to list those newspapers that had inaccurately given him one.

Cordovez, an Ecuadorean lawyer, holds the title of U.N. undersecretary general for special political affairs and has been a U.N. diplomat for more than 20 years.

In February, 1980, he was the senior U.N. official accompanying a commission of inquiry relating to U.S. hostages in Iran. He later mediated a dispute between Libya and Malta over offshore prospecting rights.