Biography, Dr Michel Chossudovsky, Dr.Evgeny Chossudovsky: Writerwith a distinguished UN career

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small Pox

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060212&articleId=1955

Evgeny Chossudovsky: Writer with a distinguished UN career

Global Research, February 12, 2006
The Irish Times - 2006-01-18

Throughout his UN career and until his death, Evgeny Chossudovsky
expressed his firm support for the Palestinian cause. He supported
the Centre for Research on Globalization from the outset. Global
Research will continue in his footsteps to support the causes of
social justice and World peace. (Michel Chossudovsky)

The Irish Times
January 28, 2006 Saturday

OBITUARY

Dr Evgeny Chossudovsky, who has died aged 91, was a Russian Jewish
émigré who had a distinguished career with the United Nations
following the second World War. In Dublin, in the late 1970s, he
continued another role as a prestigious writer on international
relations.

He was a trenchant, knowledgeable and dogged participant in
internationalist discussions at the Royal Irish Academy and in many
publications, including The Irish Times. "Chossy" to his friends, he
was well known too for a fine sense of humour.

His family had been displaced by the civil war that followed the 1917
Russian Revolution and by the first World War.

The Irish connection was made in the 1930s when, as a student, he met
his wife Rachel Sullivan, then studying at Queen's University Belfast,
at a Geneva summer school. She was from a Co Antrim Protestant family.
In 1939 they were married in a Belfast registry office. In the late
1970s they settled in Baily, Howth.

Chossudovsky "decided he wanted to be in the UN before it even
existed", his son Michel, professor of economics at the University of
Ottawa, said at his funeral. In 1947 he became one of three special
assistants to the distinguished Swedish economist, and later Nobel
laureate, Gunnar Myrdal, director of the UN's Economic Commission for
Europe (ECE).

As the Cold War deepened, Myrdal and his "ECE trinity" pushed the
concept of East-West co-operation and peaceful coexistence between
conflicting economic systems, in which Chossudovsky believed
passionately.

He served the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) under
the Argentinian former central banker, Raúl Prebisch. Intended to
embrace the aspirations of poor countries, Unctad was a Non-Aligned
Movement initiative. Chossudovsky was secretary of its Trade and
Development Board and his considerable diplomatic skills as a
consensus-maker emerged at international conferences. He worked behind
the scenes, often into the small hours, agreeing resolutions with
delegations in a determination to achieve global social justice.

But as the toothless Unctad became undermined by the "neo-liberal"
agenda and the later Uruguay Round and General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (Gatt), Chossudovsky moved to become director of the UN
Institute for Training and Research (Unitar) in Geneva. Later, in semi-
retirement, he became a special fellow of the institute. All his life
Chossudovsky retained a patriotic attachment to Russia and a sympathy
for socialist ideas. But at the end he expressed disappointment that
the spirit of the UN was being undermined, saying only weeks ago to
his son that the world was now "in an awful situation".

He was born in 1914 into an affluent Jewish merchant family in Rostov-
on-Don near the Sea of Azov. His grandfather traded in wheat. The
family went to Berlin in 1921 during the civil war. Their property had
been confiscated.

His father was a gifted actor who had trained as a lawyer but as a Jew
was unable to practise. In Rostov-on-Don he ran a Shakespearean
theatre and in Berlin various jobs included selling ice-cream on the
street. But Chossudovsky's beloved rich maternal uncle, Moses Gorfman,
stepped in to "look after" the family, particularly as it became
dispersed.

In Berlin Chossudovsky resumed school, and studied Goethe. He became
equally fluent in German and Russian - and later English and French.
After school, he applied to universities abroad. As a Jew, there was
little question of studying in Nazi Germany.

He was accepted by the University of Edinburgh, where he studied
economics and earned a PhD.

As Chossudovsky's studies started in 1934 his uncle Moses, a
businessman who traded in the stock market, was living in London. He
later left for Paris, where Evgeny's parents joined him. During the
war, on the night French police came to take uncle Moses away for
extermination at Auschwitz, his parents were overlooked.

Chossudovsky received no news of them until after the war. He worked
for the Co-operative Movement, first in Wales as an adult education
officer for miners giving evening courses in international affairs,
and then in London. Highly committed to its ideals, he worked for the
movement until 1947.

A year earlier, he had applied to the UN. He had a Soviet passport and
the UN wanted Russians. After a brief stint in New York (which he
judged no place to bring up children) he transferred to the Europe
office of the UN in Geneva. Ever since falling in love in Geneva he
had wanted to live there.

Chossudovsky was author and co-author of several books including The
Helsinki Final Act Viewed in the United Nations Perspective. He co-
edited The United Nations System at Geneva - A Working Guide and
contributed to the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde Diplomatique
and the journal Foreign Affairs. He was also a frequent participant at
disarmament conferences of the Pugwash group.

His Irish Times contributions were on a wide range of issues,
including the North. He also contributed to the Royal Irish Academy's
Irish Studies in International Affairs. Dr Ronan Fanning, professor of
history at UCD, said Chossudovsky was "an outside voice" at the
academy who "played a role broadening our perspectives" at a time when
objective discussion was difficult in Ireland. He loved Wilde, Beckett
and Joyce.

He was predeceased by his wife Rachel in 1996; is survived by his
daughter, Eugenia, son Michel and his wife Micheline; and two
grandchildren, Natacha and Maya.

Dr Evgeny Michel Chossudovsky: born August 15th, 1914; died January
4th, 2006



P.S.
Google is mischieving with my posts ? If there are duplicate, they are
because sometimes I post and it does not and if I repeat it dups at
other times. It only happens from this account ... so its targetted.
Google mischief or censorship to put me in disrepute as
spammer ????!!!!
 

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