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Daum in 2000

Werner Daum (born 1943) is a German diplomat and author, specialising in the cultural history of Yemen, Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula.

Diplomatic career

From 1992 to 1995, he was Head of the Human Rights Department in the German mission in Geneva. As such, he represented Germany in the Commission on Human Rights and various other Human Rights organisations of the United Nations in Geneva. After having served as minister-counselor at the German embassy in Tirana, Daum was Germany's ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000.

Publications on political events and art history of the Middle East

At a farewell ceremony in Khartoum

In 2000–2001, Daum was a fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.[1] In the summer of 2001, Daum wrote an article for the Harvard International Review entitled “Universalism and the West — An Agenda for Understanding”, in which he criticised the US government for destroying the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum during the 1998 bombing campaign, codenamed Operation Infinite Reach. Having worked in Sudan as ambassador of Germany during the time of the attack, he wrote that there was no evidence that the factory had produced precursors to chemical weapons and that Ghazi Sulayman, an internationally respected Sudanese human rights advocate, was a credible witness to this. Furthermore, Daum claimed that the attack caused a serious shortage in medication and that a "reasonable guess" for the deaths of civilians in Sudan caused by this shortage was in the "tens of thousands".[2] This claim was described as "hard to take seriously" and implausible by historian Keith Windschuttle.[3]

In 1999, the Museum für Völkerkunde, now Museum Fünf Kontinente, (Museum of Ethnography) in Munich, Germany, published Daum's comprehensive catalogue for its exhibition on the cultural history of Yemen. Apart from this, Daum is the author of several other books and articles on the cultural history of Albania, Sudan or Yemen, with a special interest in the pre-Islamic history of Yemen.

Publications

Sources

  1. ^ "Weatherhead Center for International Affairs names 2000-01 fellows". Harvard Gazette. 21 September 2000. Retrieved 4 May 2021.
  2. ^ Werner, Daum (Summer 2001). "Universalism and the West: An Agenda for Understanding". Harvard International Review. 23 (2): 19–23. JSTOR 42762701. Archived from the original on 30 July 2010. p. 19: It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess.
  3. ^ The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
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