BBC Online :
A Japanese academic and diplomat who became the first female to be appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees has died aged 92.
Sadako Ogata worked on some of the largest crises of the decade during
her time in service from 1991 to 2000.
Challenges included helping Kurdish refugees fleeing from Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, and the Balkans War.
She was known for her great passion in working to protect the “defenceless and dispossessed”.
Sadako Ogata was born in Tokyo in 1927, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat father.
She was also the great-granddaughter of former Japanese prime minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, who was assassinated in 1932 in an attempted coup d’état.
She went on to live and study abroad, obtaining a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Washington DC and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.
Before joining the UN, she was an academic – serving as dean of the faculty of foreign studies at Sophia University in Tokyo in 1989, where she had been a professor since 1980.
In 1991, she became the first woman, the first Japanese person, and the first academic to be installed as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Within weeks of starting her job, she was faced with one of the biggest crises of the 1990s – millions of Kurdish refugees had fled to Iran after the Gulf War.
“I didn’t really know what I was getting into, because what happened after I took up the office was very different from what everyone assumed would happen in the world,” she told the Japan Times in 2005.
She would go on to oversee large-scale operations in areas including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and the Great Lakes region of Africa.
A Japanese academic and diplomat who became the first female to be appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees has died aged 92.
Sadako Ogata worked on some of the largest crises of the decade during
her time in service from 1991 to 2000.
Challenges included helping Kurdish refugees fleeing from Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, and the Balkans War.
She was known for her great passion in working to protect the “defenceless and dispossessed”.
Sadako Ogata was born in Tokyo in 1927, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat father.
She was also the great-granddaughter of former Japanese prime minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, who was assassinated in 1932 in an attempted coup d’état.
She went on to live and study abroad, obtaining a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Washington DC and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.
Before joining the UN, she was an academic – serving as dean of the faculty of foreign studies at Sophia University in Tokyo in 1989, where she had been a professor since 1980.
In 1991, she became the first woman, the first Japanese person, and the first academic to be installed as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Within weeks of starting her job, she was faced with one of the biggest crises of the 1990s – millions of Kurdish refugees had fled to Iran after the Gulf War.
“I didn’t really know what I was getting into, because what happened after I took up the office was very different from what everyone assumed would happen in the world,” she told the Japan Times in 2005.
She would go on to oversee large-scale operations in areas including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and the Great Lakes region of Africa.
