Ellen Berends

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ellen Berends (born September 13, 1955 in Dordrecht ) is a Dutch diplomat . After working as the Dutch ambassador in Kinshasa and Zagreb , she has been consul general in Düsseldorf since 2018 .

Life

From 1967 to 1972 she attended the Lyceum ( MMS ) in Dordrecht, then an Atheneum -A in Dordrecht . She completed a degree in modern history at the University of Leiden in 1982 with a doctorate. She first studied to become a teacher there. In 1981 she spent an exchange year at Lomonosov University in Moscow .

During her studies she was a research assistant at the University of Leiden and after completing her studies worked at the university on a project on social contrasts in armed conflict. She completed training in the Foreign Service from 1984 to 1985.

She is married to the South African writer Nicolaas Vergunst and has three children.

Diplomatic career

In 1985 she joined the Foreign Service. Her first assignment abroad was from 1985 to 1987 as the third embassy secretary in Moscow. In the Dutch Foreign Ministry in The Hague , she was Deputy Head of the Departments for Political Relations and Development Cooperation, responsible for Yugoslavia and Albania , and later also Bosnia and Herzegovina (reconstruction aid), Macedonia and South Africa . From 1997 to 2001 she was Deputy Head of Mission at the Dutch Embassy in Hanoi , and from 2001 to 2005 Consul General in Cape Town . From 2005 to 2007 she was deputy head of mission and head of the economic department at the Dutch embassy in Kiev .

She had her first appointment as ambassador in 2007. Until 2010 she was the Dutch ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Kinshasa, co-accredited for the Republic of the Congo . From 2010 to 2014 she was the permanent representative of the Netherlands to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg . From 2014 to 2018 she was ambassador to Croatia , since then she has been consul general in Düsseldorf. Her successor in Zagreb was Henk Voskamp .

Publications

Her publications, mainly on Eastern Europe, appeared in publications of the Dutch Foreign Ministry, in the Oost-Europa Verkenningen and in the monthly magazine Internationale Spectator . She contributed case studies to Alex P. Schmid's Soviet Military Interventions Since 1945 , which was published by Transaction Books in 1985 .

Web links