Warren Zimmermann, the last American ambassador to
 Yugoslavia, who held senior diplomatic posts in several
 other countries, died Tuesday at his home in Great Falls,
 Va. He was 69.

 The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his son, Tim.

 Mr.  Zimmermann served in a united Yugoslavia beginning in 1989
 and was recalled by the elder Bush's administration in 1992
 to protest the increasing violence of the civil war there.

 Seeing the country's breakup and the further increase in
 violence along nationalist lines, he urged the Clinton
 administration to take military action.

 When that administration at first demurred at the use of
 force, Mr. Zimmermann resigned in protest from his next
 job, as director of refugee affairs, in 1994.

 In more than three decades in the Foreign Service, Mr.
 Zimmermann served in France, Austria, Spain, Switzerland,
 Venezuela and the Soviet Union. He was chairman of the
 United States delegation to the Conference on Security and
 Cooperation in Europe and was a deputy in negotiations with
 the Soviet Union over nuclear arms and space.

 But Mr. Zimmermann's focus at the peak of his career was on
 Yugoslavia, and that country's disintegration both
 surprised and horrified him. When he first settled in
 Belgrade as ambassador, he was quick to dismiss the
 centrifugal forces pulling the country apart. "I believe it
 will stick together as a unified country," he told The
 Boston Globe in 1990.

 Yet the violence grew, primarily fueled by the nationalist
 appeals of the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, and
 Muslims were the target of a plan of "ethnic cleansing."
 Mr. Zimmermann, who had been strongly supportive of the
 Bush administration's policy, increasingly spoke of the
 need to curb Serbian aggression.

 After his recall by the Bush administration in 1992, he
 directed the State Department's Bureau of Refugee Programs.


 Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday called Mr.
 Zimmermann "among our finest career ambassadors" and "an
 eloquent defender of human rights and refugees."

 In 1994 he became the most prominent of several Foreign
 Service officers who quit their jobs and left the Foreign
 Service to dramatize the need for intervention in Bosnia.

 Warren Christopher, then secretary of state, recognized Mr.
 Zimmermann's principled stand soon after he resigned.

 "For 33 years, Warren Zimmermann has devoted his
 professional life to the meticulous and thoughtful
 promotion of American interests abroad, and he has earned
 the respect he enjoys here and overseas," Mr. Christopher
 said.

 When the Clinton administration eventually persuaded NATO
 to bomb Serbian positions and brokered a peace agreement in
 Dayton, Ohio, to end the war, Mr. Zimmermann felt
 vindicated, his son said.

 "He was very gratified when the Clinton administration did
 intervene militarily, but he would have been more gratified
 if they had acted sooner and saved more lives," Tim
 Zimmermann said.

 Mr. Zimmermann, who grew up in Haverford, Pa., graduated
 from Yale and was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge
 University. He entered the diplomatic corps in 1961.

 He was a student of history and wrote three books. His
 first, "Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its
 Destroyers," won the American Academy of Diplomacy book
 award for 1997.

 His second book, released in 2002, is about the rise of
 America as a world power after the Spanish-American War.

 His last book, "First Great Triumph: How Five Americans
 Made Their Country a World Power" (2002), about the
 Spanish-American War, also won the book award from the
 American Academy of Diplomacy.

 He is survived by his wife, Corinne; his daughters Corinne,
 of Watertown, Mass., and Lily, of London; his son, Tim, of
 Washington; his brother, Albert, of Flourtown, Pa.; and his
 sisters Barbara Johnson of Radnor, Pa., and Helene Hill of
 West Orange, N.J.