Kilian Kleinschmidt | |
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| Occupation(s) | Director, Switxboard |
Kilian Kleinschmidt (born 1962 in Essen, West Germany) is a German entrepreneur and former UNHCR official who served as the director of the Zaatari refugee camp. [1]
Kilian Kleinschmidt | |
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| Born | |
| Occupation(s) | Director, Switxboard |
Kilian Kleinschmidt (born 1962 in Essen, West Germany) is a German entrepreneur and former UNHCR official who served as the director of the Zaatari refugee camp. [1]
Kleinschmidt was born in Essen, West Germany as the son of teachers, and grew up in Berlin. After taking his A-Levels, he worked as a roofer. He then joined a cooperative that raised 35 goats in the Pyrenees to make cheese. At 26, during a motorcycle trip in Mali, he met an aid worker and helped out to build a school in Youvarou. He subsequently went on to be associated with UN aid agencies in different capacities. He has five biological children from three relationships and currently resides in Tunis, Tunisia . [2] [3]
He worked in Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War and helped organise a camp for the Lost Boys of Sudan. He was in Mogadishu in 1993 during the Battle of Mogadishu. He spent two years in Sri Lanka as a liaison to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels. He also coordinated the rescue of Rwandan Hutu refugees caught in the rain forests of Congo in 1997 for UNHCR. He repaired an old railroad built by the Belgians, and used a train powered by a steam locomotive to rescue many of the refugees. He has also worked as the Deputy UNHCR representative in Kenya and deputy to the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General for assistance to Pakistan. [2] [4] [5]
He took over as the 'Senior Field Coordinator' for UNHCR at the Zaatari refugee camp on March 12, 2013 following a series of temporary camp directors. He was tasked with restoring order in the second largest refugee camp in the world. After a 25-year stint with the UN, he founded his own aid consultancy called Switxboard. He also serves as a consultant on refugee matters to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior. [2] [6] [7]
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with over 18,879 staff working in 138 countries as of 2020.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is a United Nations related organization working in the field of migration. The organization implements operational assistance programmes for migrants, including internally displaced persons, refugees, and migrant workers.
Humanitarian aid workers belonging to United Nations organisations, PVOs / NGOs or the Red Cross / Red Crescent are among the list of protected persons under international humanitarian law that grant them immunity from attack by belligerent parties. However, attacks on humanitarian workers have occasionally occurred, and become more frequent since the 1990s and 2000s. In 2017, the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) documented 139 humanitarian workers killed in intentional attacks out of the estimated global population of 569,700 workers. In every year since 2013, more than 100 humanitarian workers were killed. This is attributed to a number of factors, including the increasing number of humanitarian workers deployed, the increasingly unstable environments in which they work, and the erosion of the perception of neutrality and independence. In 2012 road travel was seen to be the most dangerous context, with kidnappings of aid workers quadrupling in the last decade, reaching more aid workers victims than any other form of attack.
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Wendy Jean Chamberlin is a veteran diplomat who has served in the United States Department of State and USAID, worked for the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), and served as President of the Middle East Institute until 2018.
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