Sadruddin Aga Khan
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan served as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1966 to 1977. He reoriented the agency’s focus beyond Europe and prepared it for an explosion of complex refugee issues. He died of cancer at the age of 70, and was buried in Switzerland. His father was the 48th hereditary Imam of the Nizari Ismaili Muslims.
About Sadruddin Aga Khan in brief
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan served as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1966 to 1977. He reoriented the agency’s focus beyond Europe and prepared it for an explosion of complex refugee issues. The Prince’s interest in ecological issues led him to establish the Bellerive Foundation in the late 1970s. He was a knowledgeable and respected collector of Islamic art. He married twice, but had no children of his own. He died of cancer at the age of 70, and was buried in Switzerland. His father was the 48th hereditary Imam of the Nizari Ismaili Muslims. He held French, Iranian, and Swiss citizenship and was fluent in French, English, German and Italian, while also speaking some Persian and Arabic. He lived in Eliot House with Paul Matisse, grandson of French artist Henri Matisse. He also lived with future Paris Review founders George Plimpton and John Train, and with Stephen Joyce, the grandson of Irish writer James Joyce. He described Iran as the cradle of his family, though he never lived there. He would later describe it as \”one of UNESCO’s great achievements\” because of the challenging historical context in which it took place, in particular the ongoing tensions in the Middle East and the Cold War. In 1972, he played a key role in finding new homes for tens of thousands of South Asians expelled from Uganda by Id Amin. His determination helped prepare the UNHCR for a change in the landscape of internationally displaced persons.
He did not discriminate between refugees between European and Third World refugees. He chose to adapt the UNHCR to increase the international community’s step at large and adapt to the complexity of refugee issues at large. By the end of 1977, he chose to extend the UNHCR’s mandate well beyond its original focus on Eastern Europe, extending the organisation’s reach to reach to Palestine, Vietnam, Algeria and Angola. He had a keen interest in Islamic art and was a well-known collector of Persian and Iranian art. His wife, the former Andrée Joséphine Carron, was an editor for the Harvard Lampoon, and he was a collector of Iranian and Persian art. The couple had two children, a son, a daughter, and a son-in-law. He is buried in Geneva, Switzerland, and is survived by his wife and two step-daughters, both of whom he married in the 1950s and 1960s. His son, the late Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Ag a Khan III, was the only child of Sir Sultan and his second wife, Andrée Joséphine Carron. He served as a Special Envoy to the U.N. in 1959 with a focus on World Refugee Year. In January 1966, he became the youngest person ever to lead the UNHCR. For the next twelve years he directed the UN refugee agency through one of its most difficult periods, coordinating the international response to the 1971 Bangladesh crisis that uprooted 10 million people, the 1972 exodus of Burundi to Tanzania and the Vietnamese boat people of the mid-1970s.
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