Fereydoun Hoveyda

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Fereydoun Hoveyda

Fereydoun Hoveyda (born September 21, 1924 in Damascus , Syria , † November 3, 2006 in Clifton , Virginia ) was a Persian or Iranian politician, diplomat and writer.

Life

The son of a diplomat grew up in Beirut , among other places, and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris .

Like his father, Hoveyda entered the diplomatic service and was briefly press attaché before accompanying his professor René Cassin in preparation for the San Francisco Conference , which resulted in the founding of the UN . He then helped prepare the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was one of its signatories.

In 1948 he received a doctorate in international law and economics from the Sorbonne. He then worked for UNESCO . During this further stay in Paris, he began writing novels. He was also a founding member of the “Cahiers du Cinema”, a film magazine that promoted the new generation of young film directors. He wrote the screenplay for the film India - Matri Bhumi (1959) by Roberto Rossellini .

Hoveyda served the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Deputy Foreign Minister from 1966 to 1971. As such, he tried unsuccessfully , together with the Shah and his brother Amir Abbas Hoveyda, to end the Vietnam War with the then US President Lyndon B. Johnson .

He then served as Ambassador and Chief Delegate to the United Nations from 1971 to 1979 . After the murder of several Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972 , he became chairman of an ad hoc committee of the UN on issues of international terrorism . In 1973 he became chairman of the UN Committee for International Disarmament.

After the overthrow of the Shah by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, Hoveyda was forced out of the diplomatic service. His brother Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who had been Prime Minister until August 1977, was executed by the followers of Khomeini. In an open letter to the new Prime Minister in the New York Times , he described his brother's execution as murder . Nevertheless, he also criticized the corruption within the Shah's regime.

Later on, Hoveyda dealt with the dangers of Islamic extremism in his publications and was a visiting scholar on the National Committee for American Foreign Policy in New York .

He became a US citizen in the early 1990s. He left his wife Gisela Hoveyda, with whom he was married for 38 years, as well as the two daughters Roxana and Mandana.

Works (selection)

  • The Fall of the Shah . Windham, New York 1980, ISBN 0-671-61003-1 .
  • What do the Arabs want? (“Que veulent les Arabes?”). Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-426-04867-1 .
  • L'Islam bloqué . Laffont, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-221-07411-4 .
  • My Uncle Sardari's Schindler List . New York 1997.
  • The Broken Crescent. The threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism . Praeger, Westport, Conn. 1998, ISBN 0-275-95837-X .
  • The Shah and the Ayatollah. Iranian Mythology and Islamic Revolution . Praeger, Westport, Conn. 2003, ISBN 0-275-97858-3 .
Scripts

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hoveyda, Fereydoun
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Iranian politician and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 21, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Damascus
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 2006
Place of death Clifton , Virginia