Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 1991-2000, has passed away. She was 92 years old. Mrs. Ogata was the first woman to lead UNHCR. She dealt with numerous humanitarian crises during her tenure, including in northern Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and the Great Lakes region of Africa. She later wrote a book about those years, entitled The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s (Norton, 2005).
Mrs. Ogata was the HC during my time at UNHCR. As an academic, she was very supportive of in-house research efforts, building library collections, and disseminating information. The first State of the World's Refugees was published in 1993, soon after she joined the organization. And it was under her watch that the Centre for Documentation on Refugees became the Centre for Documentation and Research. As part of the CDR team, I contributed to the development of a suite of information resources on CD-ROM (the first Refworld!). Moreover, in 1996, CDR oversaw the production of the first UNHCR web site.
You can read Mrs. Ogata's speeches here.
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