LONDON -- Sadako Ogata was at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs in April for the release of the book she has written about her experiences as U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) between 1991 and 2000.
"The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s" (published this year by W.W. Norton and Co. of New York and London) should be read by all politicians and officials involved with issues of international peace. It is a searing account of a series of humanitarian disasters that show that the capacity for man's inhumanity to man has not changed since the tragedies and slaughter of two world wars.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his foreword, pays tribute to the efforts of Ogata to relieve suffering. While the end of the Cold War brought to an end long-standing conflicts, a proliferation of ethnic, tribal and religious conflicts followed "in which population displacement was no longer a mere consequence of war, but often its very purpose. The result was massive disorder, from the disintegration of Yugoslavia to genocide in Rwanda."