Arnold Smith (diplomat)

Arnold Cantwell Smith , CH , OC (born January 18, 1915 in Toronto , Ontario , † February 7, 1994 ibid) was a Canadian diplomat and former Secretary General of the Commonwealth of Nations .

Life

His father was Victor Arnold Smith (* 1883) and his mother Sarah Cory Smith nee Cantwell. He also had a younger brother, Wilfred Cantwell Smith . The family was Presbyterian oriented. Smith began his diplomatic career first in the service of the British Foreign Office and was in its service in 1940 first attaché at the embassy in Estonia and then from 1940 to 1943 at the embassy in Egypt .

In 1943 he switched to the diplomatic service of Canada and in the following years found work at the embassies in the Soviet Union , Belgium , Cambodia and the United Kingdom, as well as at the Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City .

Between 1958 and 1961 he was ambassador to the United Arab Republic and then to the Soviet Union until 1963. In 1963 he returned to Canada and became Deputy Undersecretary in the State Department.

In 1965 he was elected the first general secretary of the Commonwealth of Nations . He had hardly taken up this post when the bond of the Commonwealth was endangered by the unilateral declaration of sovereignty of Great Britain by the white minority in Rhodesia . In 1970 he was re-elected for a second five-year term. In 1971 the alliance was threatened again when Great Britain announced arms sales to South Africa . Smith asked Prime Minister Edward Heath to refrain from this plan and was ultimately successful. During his until 1975 permanent tenure there were still other events that were to ordeals for the Alliance: the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda , the civil war in Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh , the exclusion of Singapore from the Malayan Federation and coups in Ghana , Cyprus , Pakistan and Nigeria . As Secretary General, Smith endeavored to lead the Commonwealth "from a declining but meaningful British centrism to a full multilateralism ".

He was also a co-founder and first chairman of the North-South Institute in Ottawa in 1976 . For his services he was awarded the Order of the Companions of Honor in 1976 and the officer level of the Order of Canada in 1984.

Web links

• rulers.org