Dame Margaret Anstee
June 25 1926-August 25 2016
Margaret Anstee overcame childhood poverty to become one of Britain’s first woman diplomats, and the first female under-secretary-general of the United Nations. In the latter role she coordinated the response to disasters from the Bangladesh cyclone to Chernobyl, and led the UN team verifying an abortive peace settlement in Angola.
Margaret Joan Anstee was born at Writtle, Essex, the daughter of a typesetter, and was educated at Chelmsford High School, learning Spanish in three months to win a place at Newnham College, Cambridge. She lectured in Spanish at Queen’s University, Belfast, before joining the Foreign Office in 1948. Appointed to the Latin American section, she was told no woman could be sent there lest they succumb to a local male.
She was shortlisted to succeed Denis Healey as international secretary of the Labour Party but when the UN Technical Assistance Board (Untab) offered her a job in Mexico she accepted instead, only for the head of mission to veto the appointment of a woman. Early in 1956 she went to Colombia. A colleague ordered her to take shorthand; by that August she was running the UN’s office in Bogota.
She was sent to Bolivia in 1960 and set up a cooperation programme with Britain’s new Ministry of Overseas Development; when she left, the Bolivians named a hospital after her and offered her a medal – which the UN made her refuse.
In 1965 she moved to Ethiopia, encouraging Haile Selassie to improve public health. Then, to be close to her ailing mother, she returned to Britain as deputy head of Harold Wilson’s Downing Street ‘think tank’ under Tommy Balogh. When Balogh returned to academia Anstee became acting head of the think tank, but left when Wilson would not order the Cabinet Secretary to let her see papers on the economy.
She rejoined the UN in 1969 as chief of staff to the Australian Sir Robert Jackson, to whom she became close until his death in 1991. After a spell in Morocco, she moved to Chile in 1972. Pulled out to help tackle the cyclone in Bangladesh, she was in Britain when Pinochet seized power. She managed to rescue several UN staff who had been tortured, and protect Chilean refugees (Britain refused them asylum). She persuaded Pinochet’s ministers to continue key UN programmes. In 1974 she was promoted to assistant secretary-general. Javier Perez de Cuéllar sent her back to Bolivia; she worked up a second development programme that won international and IMF support.
In 2003 she wrote from retirement: “Last winter the only road from La Paz to my house was blocked by guerrillas; I ended up riding home in a convoy, disguised as a Bolivian soldier.” In Guatemala 51 politicians she dealt with were murdered. She added: “Having seen what happened in Chile, the most civilised country in the continent, I realise you can never know what humans are capable of doing to one another.”
James Douglas
Right Reverend David Jenkins
January 26 1925-September 4 2016
The Bishop of Durham from 1984 to 1994, David Jenkins was loathed by Margaret Thatcher and loved by the region’s miners for his capacity to challenge the Establishment, often with impeccable theological arguments. He constantly questioned everything from monetarism to the virgin birth, which made him both powerful enemies and devoted friends.
Jenkins’s consecration in Durham Cathedral was carried out during the Great Miners’ Strike, and in the course of his sermon he described the then chairman of the National Coal Board as “an elderly imported American whose withdrawal to leave a reconciling opportunity for some local product is surely neither dishonourable nor improper”.
Jenkins made no secret of his socialist convictions and his support – which was often highly critical – of the Labour Party. When challenged, he simply pointed out that his sermons and speeches had caused religious faith to be discussed in pubs and market places. In Durham diocese he was highly regarded as a deeply caring bishop and, since the people of the North East were feeling the brutal impact of monetarism, his attacks on the Thatcher administration were both pertinent and popular.
David Edward Jenkins was born of Welsh parents, and was schooled at St Dunstan’s College, Catford. Leaving school in wartime, he first served in the Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of captain; when the war ended he went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he read Greats, then completed a Theology degree in one year, taking a First.
After a year at Lincoln Theological College he was ordained in 1952 to the dual post of Succentor of Birmingham Cathedral and Lecturer at The Queen’s College, Birmingham. Two years later he was appointed Fellow, Chaplain and Praelector in Theology at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he remained for 15 years. He became Canon Theologian of Leicester Cathedral in 1966. In 1969 Jenkins left Oxford to join the staff of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, as director of Humanum Studies.
Returning to England in 1973 he became director of the William Temple Foundation in Manchester and continued his work relating the Christian faith to contemporary social issues. He moved to Leeds as Professor of Theology in 1979, and his many pronouncements in print and from the pulpit, which had aroused little public interest when he was an academic, became incendiary when he became a bishop. On his retirement from Durham, Jenkins became an assistant bishop in the diocese of Ripon and Leeds.
Ian Hernon
Islam Karimov
January 30 1938-September 2 2016
The Uzbek president Islam Karimov rose to power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was widely regarded as one of the region’s most vicious dictators. George W. Bush and successive US administrations, however, saw him as a key ally in the “war on terror.”
Karimov rose to power under the USSR, becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Uzbek SSR. In 1991 he repositioned himself and promoted himself to ‘elected’ president of the new independent republic of Uzbekistan. He adapted old Soviet methods to the new era, replacing the KGB with a near-identical security bureau, the SNB. In the 15 years following independence, he closed the country’s borders, put a 70 per cent tax on imports, shut down the bazaars, forbade the development of private property rights and imposed stringent price controls. Laws were passed ending cash trading and forcing all business transactions to go through state-owned banks. Subsequently living standards collapsed.
Only Karimov and his cronies prospered, thanks to his practice of forcing collective cotton farms to sell their produce to the state at a nominal fee, then selling it on the international market at enormous profit. Karimov was ‘re-elected’ several times, seldom winning less than 90 per cent of the vote, the result of a ban on all genuine opposition parties. Criticism was ruthlessly suppressed; religious observance was restricted.
By 2005, up to 10,000 dissidents were in prison where there was “widespread, rampant and systematic” use of torture, with electrocution, chlorine-filled gas masks, drowning, rape, shooting and savage beatings. In 2002 two of Karimov’s critics were boiled alive.
After becoming the first regional leader to sign up to President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ following 9/11, in return for the use of an airbase at Khanabad for ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan, Karimov was rewarded with a full-dress White House reception and US aid worth more than $200 million a year. Later he allowed Uzbekistan be used for ‘rendition’, the practice of exporting terror suspects to countries less squeamish about torture than Britain or the US.
But Karimov’s attempts to present domestic repression as part of the international ‘war on terror’ looked less than convincing when, during disturbances in the Ferghana Valley region in May 2005, Uzbek troops fired on demonstrators in the town of Andijan, many of them unarmed women and children, killing, by some estimates, 300 people.
Islam Abduganievich Karimov was born in Samarkand and raised in a state orphanage. He studied Engineering and Economics at university, joined the Tashkent Farm Machinery Plant and, in 1966, moved to Uzbekistan’s State Planning Department. His robust support for Communism quickly won him promotion and he became the department’s chairman in 1986.
Ironically, it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to reform by purging local parties of corrupt officials that provided Karimov with his opening. In 1989, with his main rivals removed from office, he was elected First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party.
James Douglas
Peter Barry
August 10 1928-August 26 2016
As the Republic of Ireland’s foreign minister, Peter Barry enraged Ulster Loyalists by negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave Dublin for the first time a limited say in the affairs of the North. He served in Garret FitzGerald’s Fine Gael-Labour coalition of 1982-87 and, although a committed nationalist, he condemned the IRA as “enemies of their own people”.
During the Falklands conflict, Barry accused Charles Haughey of “Brit-bashing” for refusing to participate in EC sanctions against Argentina. When Fine Gael returned to office, he and FitzGerald ended Haughey’s freeze on ministerial contacts and when, late in 1983, he, Fitzgerald and the Labour deputy premier Dick Spring flew to London for a summit with Mrs Thatcher, the relationship was back on course.
That led to the Agreement, signed at Hillsborough Castle in November 1985; it established an Inter-Governmental Council of which Barry became co-chairman, with a secretariat in Belfast, giving the Republic a conduit for raising its
concerns. Though the Agreement ruled out any change in the status of the North without the consent of its majority, Loyalists condemned Mrs Thatcher’s involvement, but reserved the greatest fury for Barry.
In pursuit of political initiatives for the North, Barry engaged with President Reagan while urging Irish-Americans not to fund the Provisionals; visiting in 1983, he rebuked organisers of New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade for making it a “gesture of support for the IRA”.
Barry was born in Cork, educated at Christian Brothers’ College, Cork, and he became a successful tea importer. He was elected to the Dail for Cork City South-East in 1969, representing the city for 28 years.
In September 1986 Barry and Sir Geoffrey Howe set up an international fund to aid Ireland, north and south. He carpeted the Israeli ambassador after an Irish UN peacekeeper was killed by troops operating in south Lebanon. And he reacted angrily to an interview in which Colonel Gaddafi supported the IRA and called for the re-election of his “friend” Haughey.
Barry was active in support of the six Irishmen jailed in 1975 for the Birmingham pub bombings, declaring that the vast majority of Irish people were convinced of their innocence. He kept up the pressure, and when the Appeal Court quashed the convictions in 1991 said there was an “injustice that must still be corrected”. He continued to work for devolution in the North, from 1989 as a member of the Anglo-Irish Parliamentary Body.
Ian Hernon
Walter Scheel
July 8 1919-August 23 2016
The President of West Germany from 1974 to 1979 was the son of a wheelwright who started his working life as a bank clerk. During the Second World War he served in the Luftwaffe, in the last years of the war as a radar operator on a Bf 110 night fighter. Much later it emerged that he had also joined the Nazi party in 1942, though Scheel claimed that he had never applied for membership.
In 1946 Scheel joined the newly formed Free Democratic Party (FDP) and served from 1953 as a member of the Bundestag. When the FDP formed a coalition with Konrad Adenauer’s CDU in 1961, Scheel was appointed minister of economic cooperation and development. In 1969 he led his party to form a new coalition with the Social Democrats under Chancellor Willy Brandt, becoming foreign minister and vice chancellor in the new administration. He and Brandt worked together to develop the policy of ‘Ostpolitik’, officially recognising the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Scheel became the first German foreign minister to visit Israel, and in 1973, during a visit to Beijing, he established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. When Brandt resigned as Chancellor in May 1974 after one of his aides, Günter Guillaume, was charged with spying for East Germany, Scheel, as vice chancellor, chaired government meetings until Helmut Schmidt was elected Chancellor. Hans Dietrich Genscher replaced Scheel as party chairman and foreign minister, while Scheel was elected to the largely honorary post of president.
In 2012, Scheel was one of four surviving German presidents who boycotted a parade in honour of Christian Wulff, who had resigned from the presidency in February over a political favours scandal.
James Douglas