Benon Sevan, a diplomat and former UN assistant secretary general, who dedicated his life to promoting the Armenian heritage and served as a representative of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) died aged 88, on Monday.

AGBU described Benon Sevan as a beacon of guidance, a mentor, a tireless defender of Armenian cultural heritage and a “family” for many generations of Armenians in Cyprus.

“His warm personality, keen intellect, passion and selfless generosity earned him the love and respect of all those who had the blessing of knowing him,” the AGBU said.

Born in Nicosia, he graduated from the capital’s AGBU Melkonian Educational Institute, obtained a bachelor of arts degree in history and philosophy at Columbia College in New York and a graduate degree from the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University.

Joining the UN secretariat in 1965, Sevan served as a UN observer with the special representative of the secretary-general for the act of free choice in West Irian in Indonesia, Assistant Resident Representative with the Fund of the UN for the Development of West Irian, and as the senior secretariat official with the mission to inquire on the situation of prisoners of war in the Iran and Iraq conflict.

Between 1982 and March 1988, Sevan was secretary of the UN’s Economic and Social Council and served as secretary of a number of intergovernmental bodies and special UN conferences. In April 1988, he was appointed director and senior political advisor to the representative of the secretary-general on the settlement of the situation relating to Afghanistan.

In January 1990, he was also asked to serve as the secretary-general’s representative on the implementation of the Geneva Agreements on Afghanistan. In January 1991, secretary-general of the day Javier Perez de Cuellar decided that Sevan should also assume the responsibility for the overall administration of the Office for the Coordination of UN Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programmes Relating to Afghanistan.

On July 20, 1992, secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali announced the appointment of Sevan to the post of assistant secretary-general in the department of political affairs at UN Headquarters in New York, before later heading the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq between 1995 and 2003.

Through that programme, Iraq was allowed to sell oil on the global market in exchange for food, medicine, an other humanitarian needs borne by the people of Iraq, without allowing the Iraqi government of the day, led by Saddam Hussein, to boost its military capabilities.

In an interview with the Cyprus Mail’s Agnieszka Rakoczyin 2023, Sevan spoke, not only about his varied international career but also an early life of poverty in Nicosia.

Sevan’s grandparents had come to Cyprus from Adana in Turkey in 1922. His mother was only six months old when they arrived. His grandmother had three sets of twins – two boys and four girls. However, one of the daughters was lost during the massacres there so they came to the island only with the remaining five.

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

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

“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 scrutinised 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.