him’ by the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and
Social Council, and Trusteeship Council.
Given the complexity of the world, it would be impossible for
the Secretary-General personally to discharge all the functions
which these organs might call upon him to perform. To assist in
these tasks, the Secretary-General draws upon the UN’s profes-
sional bureaucracy, the Secretariat, for analysis and activity in the
field. However, it is also open to the Secretary-General to recruit
mediators. A hierarchy has developed of Special Representatives,
Personal Representatives, and envoys of other types who undertake
mediation in the field with the Secretary-General’s authority (see
Skjelsæk, 1991; Hume, 1995). It can be crucial to the success of
such endeavours that the mediator be seen as independent, rather
than simply an agent of the Security Council or the Great Powers:
indeed, one prominent mediator, Giandomenico Picco, who made it
clear in Lebanon that he was acting for the Secretary-General,
realised that he ‘could have paid for it dearly’ had he led his inter-
locutors to believe that he was acting for the Security Council
(Picco, 1999: 161).
The Soviet leadership was not eager to see Good Offices medi-
ation of this type develop. Its objective was rather to bring about
direct talks between the Karmal regime and the regime of General
Zia in Pakistan. In a letter to Cuban leader Fidel Castro dated 10
March 1980, Brezhnev made this quite clear, arguing that it ‘seems
inadvisable to us to have any degree of involvement on the part of
the General Secretary (sic) of the U.N. in these affairs. This,
among other aspects, would unavoidably be linked to the well-
known anti-Afghan resolution of the General Assembly of the
United Nations’ (Hershberg, 1996–97: 169).
The evolution of the Geneva Accords
The Geneva Accords were the product of a series of structured
negotiations orchestrated by the UN between 1982 and 1988.
Communications between Kabul and Islamabad were initiated in
April 1981 by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, who had been
The Road to Soviet Withdrawal 135