OBIT: Gen. Indar Jit Rikhye, Man of War and Peace

Indar Jit Rikhye, one of the most influential South Asians in the realm of diplomatic and military affairs, died on May 21, 2007. From an obit in the Washington Post:

I.J. Rikhye, 86, a major general in the Indian army who served as military adviser to United Nations secretaries-general Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant in the 1960s, died May 21 at the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville, near his home. He had respiratory failure.

From 1970 to 1990, he was president of the International Peace Academy, a New York-based organization that promotes the settlement of armed conflicts by training negotiators, diplomats and military personnel in peacekeeping.

The New York Times obit:

Indar Jit Rikhye, a major general in the Indian Army who was a key military adviser to United Nations peacekeepers around the world and then founding president of a research institute devoted to training peacekeepers, died May 21 in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86.   

The cause was respiratory failure, said his son Bhalinder L. Rikhye.  

As adviser to Secretaries General Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant at the United Nations from 1957 to 1967, General Rikhye set up or commanded peacekeeping forces in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

Among the nuggets in the obits:

• General Rikhye was born in 1920 in Lahore, now a city in Pakistan, the son of a former medical officer in the British Indian Army. He graduated from the Indian Military Academy in 1939 and was commissioned by King George VI to serve in the 6th Duke of Connaught’s Own Lancers, known as the Bengal Lancers.

• He saw service during World War II in the Middle East and Italy and, after India became independent in 1947, he commanded the Royal Deccan Horse in Jammu and Kashmir for four years.

• One young lieutenant under his command in 1946 was Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, future president of Pakistan. In his memoir, "Trumpets and Tumults," Gen. Rikhye wrote that he had been impressed with Zia and reversed an earlier recommendation that he not receive a commission in the regular army.

  When they next met, in 1982, Gen. Rikhye wrote that he found it ironic and deeply troubling that Zia "had acquired notoriety as a ruthless ruler and military dictator and I had become a peacekeeper."

• At the International Peace Academy, one of his methods of teaching conflict avoidance involved a simulated clash between two invented countries, which he called Andrenesia and Chinchilla. Officers and diplomats were asked to act out the kind of negotiations that would precede a Security Council resolution.

  “The simulation shows officers who may command a peacekeeping force the complex political background to their mission,” he said at the time. “It gives diplomats a taste of multilateral diplomacy.”

• General Rikhye "known throughout his career for combining a diplomatic bent with his military rigor..."

Read an in-depth four-part conversation with Rikhye from 1983 - "Problems and prospects for International Peacekeeping Efforts" (part of Univ of California, Berkeley's "Conversations with History").

See the website of the International Peace Academy.

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Comments

[skrishna08@hotmail.com, is unshine2@excite.com]

I'm sending you this article I found. Guess where they are from - Middlesex County College.
MOM

[Suja, GaramChai.com]

Good to see Obits in mainstream media on an NRI who dedicated his life to the cause of peace