Warren Zimmermann

Warren Zimmermann (November 16, 1934 – February 3, 2004) was an American career diplomat best known as the last US ambassador to SFR Yugoslavia before its disintegration in a series of civil wars. Zimmermann was a member of the Yale Class of 1956, and a member of Scroll and Key Society. He died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Great Falls, Virginia on February 3, 2004.

Career Warren Zimmermann served in Moscow (1973–75 and 1981–84), Paris, Caracas and Vienna, where he headed the US delegation at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1986–89). But it was Yugoslavia that marked him more than any other phase in his professional life, and brought him to prominence.

As the Bosnian conflict developed into a full war during spring 1992, Zimmermann supported the policy of foreign military interventionism.

According to journalist Samantha Power, the author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Zimmermann's career in Yugoslavia was marked by "frustration with the resistance of the Bush administration to intervene". His last official act before he was recalled to the United States on 16 May 1992, was to write a confidential memo called "Who Killed Yugoslavia?" to the secretary of state. Each of the five sections of the memo was headed by a verse from the poem "Who Killed Cock Robin?". In Zimmermann's analysis, the nationalism of the Balkan leaders had led to the demise of the country.

Zimmermann resigned from the diplomatic service in 1994 in protest at President Bill Clinton's reluctance to intervene in the Bosnian War. He campaigned to persuade the U.S. that it must act to end what he reportedly saw to be "Serbian aggression in the killing fields of Bosnia"

Zimmermann went on to teach at Johns Hopkins University (1994–96) and Columbia University (1996–2000), and spoke out against human rights violations.

Works

Following his ambassadorship in Yugoslavia, Zimmermann authored two books: Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers — America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why, published in 1996, and First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, a work about Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, Elihu Root, and Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, published in 2002.