Arthur Dunkel

Arthur Dunkel, a self-effacing Swiss diplomat who shepherded negotiators from five continents through more than seven years of contentious talks that led to freer trade and the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, died June 8 in Geneva. He was 72.

His death followed a long illness, according to a news release from the trade group ' s headquarters in Geneva.

Mr. Dunkel had been director-general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade for two years when a group of trade ministers met in Geneva in 1982 to discuss reducing trade barriers in the pact, which was then 34 years old. Their talks stalled over whether the changes should include agriculture, but efforts by Mr. Dunkel and others to liberalize and update trade rules to respond to growing tensions between developed and developing nations finally led in 1986 to the start of the most comprehensive trade negotiations in history, at Punte del Este, Uruguay.

" He went out of his way to give developing countries a voice, " said Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economist who served as Mr. Dunkel ' s adviser from 1991 to 1993.

The GATT talks were known as the Uruguay Round although negotiators never returned to that country. In addition to tackling bitter disputes over subsidies to agriculture and textile industries in the developed countries, they ranged over topics previously outside of GATT, like intellectual property rights and trade in services. More than 120 nations were involved by the time the final agreement was signed in Marrakesh, Morocco, in April 1994.

The signing came nine months after Mr. Dunkel resigned as director-general, but the basis of the agreement was a 500-page document he wrote late in 1991, when the negotiations seemed hopelessly deadlocked. Known as the Dunkel Draft, it laid the groundwork for creating the World Trade Organization as a successor to GATT and set the general terms on which most of the points of contention were settled.

" He would never have called it the Dunkel Draft because he was too modest, " said Clayton Yeutter, the U.S. trade representative when the Uruguay Round began. " But when things were in such disarray that it looked as if nobody could pull it together, he put together a text that was exceptionally well balanced. He could discern what people could really rally around. "

Just as important, Yeutter said, Mr. Dunkel ' s experience in international trade and personal relationships with crucial figures around the world allowed him to understand each nation ' s negotiating limits. He was fluent in five languages.

Arthur Dunkel was born Aug. 22, 1932. Reports disagree on whether he was born in Schaffhouse, Switzerland, or Lisbon, Portugal. Mr. Dunkel told The New York Times in a 1990 interview that his father was a textile designer who moved the family to Portugal in the 1930s to escape a recession in Switzerland.

Mr. Dunkel graduated from the University of Lausanne with a degree in economic and commercial services in 1956 and immediately joined a recently created Swiss government office dealing with foreign trade. He rose through a succession of jobs to become Switzerland ' s top trade official before becoming head of GATT in 1980.

After retiring from GATT in 1993, he founded a business as a trade consultant, served on the board of Nestle and taught at the University of Geneva and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.