New School University
Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, former Distinguished Fellow at the New School, Passes Away
Warren Zimmermann, the last American ambassador to Yugoslavia and a former associate of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship at the GF, passed away on February 3, 2004. He was 69.
A member of the Foreign Service for over three decades, Ambassador Zimmermann served in France, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union, but worked most extensively in Yugoslavia, where he served as Ambassador beginning in 1989. In 1992, he was recalled from Belgrade by then-President George H.W. Bush to protest Serbian aggression in the Yugoslav civil war, and was appointed to direct the State Department's Bureau of Refugee Programs. He was the most prominent of several Foreign Service officers to resign in 1994 in protest of the Clinton administration's early failure to intervene militarily in Bosnia.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said in tribute, "Warren Zimmermann ranks among our finest Career Ambassadors." Calling him an "eloquent defender of human rights and refugees," Powell said his passing was "a great loss to American diplomacy and to our State Department family."
Warren Zimmermann was a Distinguished Fellow at the New School from 1994-97. In this capacity, he served as a consultant to the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship (ICMEC) on a three-year project titled, "U.S. Migration Policy in Global Perspective," which was funded by the Global Stewardship Initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. In addition to bringing distinguished guests to the GF, like Timothy Wirth, then U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, Ambassador Zimmermann recruited a number of senior people to serve on ICMEC's advisory board. He also lectured on the breakup of Yugoslavia while at the GF, and organized a series of high-level seminars in Washington, D.C. that brought together New School and other New York City-area scholars of immigration and refugee issues with senior U.S. government officials and policymakers working in these areas.
In addition to his work at the New School, Ambassador Zimmermann taught at Columbia and Johns Hopkins University in the years following his resignation from the Foreign Service. He also authored two books during this period, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers and First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, which won the American Academy of Diplomacy book award in 1997 and 2002, respectively.
A memorial service was held at St. Alban's Church in Washington, D.C. on February 17, 2004. The church was filled to capacity, and the audience included a number of prominent government officials. Several members of Warren Zimmerman's family spoke, as did NPR reporter Anne Garrels. Ambassador Zimmermann is survived by his wife, Corinne; two daughters, Corinne and Lily; and son, Tim.
