ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

Günther Greindl (* 18). March 1939 in Ried im Traunkreis is an Austrian professional officer with the last rank of general. He has worked on various UN missions in a leading position for the Austrian secondment and also in military-related diplomatic missions.

Military career
Greindl began his military career after graduation in 1957 with the basic military service at the Tyrolean field battalion in Kufstein. From 1958 to 1961 he attended the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. Five years later, Greindl completed a General Staff course at the National Defence Academy in Vienna from 1966 to 1969. In addition to his officer career, he studied spatial planning at the Technical University of Vienna and graduated as an engineer.

After he had already been used in various positions in the Federal Army until 1965, Greindl took over as commander of a tank battalion from 1969. In July 1977, he was first assigned to a UN mission and commanded the Austrian UN contingent on Cyprus until September 1978. He then served as Deputy Chief of General Staff in the Ministry of Defence until April 1979. This was followed by another UN mission as head of the UNDOF observer force (UNDOF Ausbatt) on the Golan Heights on the border between Israel and Syria.
From 1981 to 1989 he was commander of the UN peacekeeping forces and commander of the control force UNFICYP in Cyprus.

After termination of this activity as UN Force Commander, Greindl was sent to Switzerland in 1989 as Austrian Defence Attaché. In April 1991, he was reassigned to a United Nations mission and appointed Chief Military Observer of the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission (UNIKOM). Upon his return, he was appointed Head of the General Staff Group for Military Policy and Security Co-operation, a function he held until 2000.

From 1992 to 2002, Greindl also chaired the UN project “The Use of Military and Civil Defence Assets in Disaster Relief” (MCDA) and co-chaired a UN conference in Oslo, which adopted guidelines for the use of military forces in International Disaster Relief (Oslo Guidelines).

From October 1993 to April 1994, he was Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in the United Nations Protection Force in the former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR). In August 2000, he was appointed as the first Austrian military representative to the EU, NATO and military delegate to the WEU in Brussels.

In 2002 he was promoted to general. Greindl is founding president of the Association of Austrian Peacekeepers and vice president of Eurodefense Austria. In 2013 he was awarded the Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer Prize.

Foreign missions
July 1977 to September 1978 as Austrian contingent commander in the framework of UNFICYP in Cyprus
22 April 1979 to 25 May 1981 first