USA: FORMER IRAQI AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS AND UNITED STATES NIZAR HAMDOON DIES OF CANCER IN NEW YORK AGED 59

Record ID: 338319

  • Title: USA: FORMER IRAQI AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS AND UNITED STATES NIZAR HAMDOON DIES OF CANCER IN NEW YORK AGED 59
  • Date: 24th June 1998
  • Summary: (W3) FILE, NEW YORK, USA (FILE, JUNE 24, 1998) (REUTERS) 1. CU: BRASS PLAQUE OF THE IRAQI MISSION 0.02 2. SCU: THE FORMER IRAQI AMBASSADOR NIZAR HAMDOON SPEAKING ABOUT THERE BEING NO VX IN WEAPONS IN IRAQ, THAT IRAQ WAS UNSUCCESSFUL IN STABILISING THE AGENT 0.34 3. WS: EXTERIOR OF THE IRAQI MISSION 0.39 4. TILT UP: THE IRAQI FLAG FLYING AT THE MISSION 0.43 Initials Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved
  • Embargoed: 9th July 1998 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: FILE, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
  • City:
  • Country: USA
  • Reuters ID: LVA5AGN1VF2PFR9V33C7CHMCZVZC
  • Story Text: Nizar Hamdoon, a former Iraqi ambassador to the United
    Nations and the United States, has died in a New York hospital
    of cancer, Arab diplomats reported. He was 59 years old.


    Hamdoon, who also served as deputy foreign minister
    under the ousted Saddam Hussein government, travelled back and
    forth from Iraq over the past few years for treatment at
    Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and began another round
    of chemotherapy in March.

    He had been in a coma for a week and died late on Friday
    (July 4), the diplomats told Reuters.

    As late as May, he told friends and journalists at a New
    York restaurant he expected to return to his wife and two
    teenage daughters in Baghdad within weeks. But his condition
    deteriorated rapidly. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease
    in 1987.

    U.S. officials said Hamdoon's trips to the United States,
    even with the impending war against his country, were granted
    for humanitarian reasons.

    Hamdoon served six years as Iraq's top envoy to the United
    Nations, ending in early 1999. In 1984, he opened the first
    Iraqi Embassy in the United States in 17 years and by all
    accounts was extremely popular with the administration of
    President Ronald Reagan during Iraq's war with Iran. He then
    returned to Iraq as deputy foreign minister before returning
    to the United States in his U.N. post.

    Personable and soft-spoken, Hamdoon's tenure as U.N.

    ambassador ended with a 1998 bombing raid by the Clinton
    administration for his government's failure to cooperate with
    U.N. weapons inspectors. He felt he had failed in his mission
    to build better relations with the United States and to get
    crippling sanctions lifted against his country.

    Hamdoon often spoke of his admiration for the United
    States and regretted that Iraq did not have access to the
    Internet, which he surfed on a daily basis. He even burned his
    own CD with photos and articles written about him.

    Hamdoon's family came from Mosul in the Kurdish-dominated
    region where his father was an army officer under Iraq's last
    monarch, King Faisal II. He went to an American Jesuit high
    school in Baghdad and studied architecture.

    As a young man he joined the air force as well as Saddam
    Hussein's Baath Party before entering the Foreign Ministry.

    Hamdoon married his cousin Sahar and had two teenage
    daughters, Ula and Sama.


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