Morton I. Abramowitz, a longtime U.S. diplomat who made refugee and humanitarian concerns a focal point of American foreign policy during his tenure, died on Friday at his home in Washington. He was 91.
His son, Michael, confirmed the death.
In 1991, while serving as ambassador to Turkey, Mr. Abramowitz persuaded President Turgut Ozal to let the United States use air bases in his country in its war against Iraq. Then, when a wave of Kurdish refugees flowed north to escape the wrath of Saddam Hussein, he persuaded President George H.W. Bush to protect them with a no-fly zone.
Blessed with an impatient implacability rarely found among diplomats, Mr. Abramowitz repeatedly broke with the foreign policy establishment, both as a career Foreign Service officer and later as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
His first chance to assert himself came in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter named him ambassador to Thailand.
It was a fraught moment in Southeast Asia: The region was still coping with the fallout from the Vietnam War, while the genocide in Cambodia — and that country’s invasion by Vietnam in 1978 — sent some one million refugees fleeing to the Thai border.
Mr. Abramowitz, sensing an impending famine, leaped into the fray, sending embassy staff to the border to monitor conditions and creating a group to coordinate relief efforts. He persuaded Thailand to take most of the refugees, but he also won a commitment from Washington for the U.S. to take some as well.
“He was this extraordinarily dynamic force who came across as much as an ambassador for the refugees as for the United States,” Mark Malloch-Brown, a British diplomat who was working in Thailand for the United Nations at the time, said in an interview.
Mr. Abramowitz left government that same year to become the president of the Carnegie Endowment. It was already a premier think tank, and under his leadership it became a locus for conversations about the post-Cold War world and America’s role in it.
“Mort made Carnegie the go-to place for world leaders who had any agenda in Washington,” Samantha Power, who worked there after college and is now the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in an interview.
He also used the endowment as a platform to criticize the United States in its early handling of the Balkan wars.
“When confronted with the complexities of the war in Bosnia and brazen Serbian violence, the U.S. has simply retreated,” he and the conservative diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote in The New York Times in 1994. “It pursues negotiations at any price rather than creating the conditions for a workable peace agreement.”
The crisis in the Balkans led to yet another innovation: With Mr. Malloch-Brown, and with support from the financier George Soros, Mr. Abramowitz created the International Crisis Group, which monitors emergent hot spots around the world and advises governments on how to respond.
“If his career had a through line,” Ms. Power said, “I think it was that the human consequences of what we do and what we don’t do in government matter.”
Morton Isaac Abramowitz was born on Jan. 20, 1933, in Lakewood Township, N.J., near the Jersey Shore. His parents were Jewish immigrants from what is today Lithuania; his father, Mendel, was a shohet, a person who slaughters animals according to Jewish law, and his mother, Dora (Smith) Abramowitz, managed the home.
He sped through Stanford University in three years, majoring in history and economics and graduating in 1953. He later pursued a doctorate in East Asian affairs at Harvard, receiving a master’s degree in 1955. But he left with his dissertation incomplete, deciding that academia was not for him.
After working for the Department of Labor and serving a year in the Army, he went to Taiwan in 1960 with the International Cooperation Administration, the forerunner to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Mr. Abramowitz in about 1990 with his wife, Sheppie, a highly regarded advocate for refugees at the International Rescue Committee.Credit…via Abramowitz family
He remained in Taiwan after joining the Foreign Service, then moved to Hong Kong before returning to Washington in 1966. There he held a series of increasingly senior positions at the State Department and the Department of Defense before President Carter named him ambassador to Thailand.
He was half of a humanitarian power couple: His wife, Sheppie, whom he married in 1959, was a highly regarded advocate for refugees at the International Rescue Committee.
Mrs. Abramowitz died in April. Along with their son, he is survived by their daughter, Rachel Abramowitz, and three grandchildren.
