The “diminutive giant” who helped millions of refugees
Sadako Ogata, who has died aged 92, was the first female United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the FT. Known for both her compassion and her pragmatism, she took the helm in 1991, at a time when the world was ravaged by conflict and genocide, and steered the refugee agency through one of its most difficult decades.
The former academic’s “petite stature (she was less than five foot tall) and mild manner masked a formidable moral vision”, said The New York Times. Within weeks of starting the job, Ogata was faced with one of the agency’s biggest crises in years, when more than a million Iraqi Kurds fled across the mountains towards Turkey and Iran. Realising that they’d not find safe haven in either of those countries, she acted decisively, said The Daily Telegraph: she negotiated with Iranian officials to allow the UNHCR to set up temporary camps on its borders; pushed the Commission to change its rules to help refugees displaced internally; then persuaded Iraqi officials to create safe havens for the refugees within the country. Paying tribute to her diplomatic skills, the Tehran Times referred to her as “the diminutive giant”. She would go on to oversee major operations in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi and Rwanda – where a quarter of a million people fled in just one day. Visiting 40 countries in person, she set up new procedures to allow the agency to respond more swiftly to crises, and campaigned for it to be allowed to take humanitarian preventative measures to avert them. Such was the pressure of the job, she saw her husband about once a month. “There is no greater champion and activist on behalf of the refugees of the world than Mrs Ogata,” said the US National Constitution Centre in 1995, as it bestowed the Liberty Medal on her.
Ogata was born in Tokyo in 1927, into a political family: her great-grandfather, Tsuyoshi Inukai, was assassinated in 1932 while serving as PM. Her father was a career diplomat. Sent to the US for her education, she studied international relations at Georgetown University, and had an academic career before being appointed to the Japanese delegation to the UN’s General Assembly in 1968 – at a time when few women were appointed to high ranking roles. She stepped down from the refugee agency aged 73, then served as the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency until she was 85.