W. Zimmermann, 69; Last American Envoy to Yugoslavia

Warren Zimmermann, 69, the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia before its breakup and civil war, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer in Washington, D.C.

A career foreign service officer, Zimmermann was named ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush. At the time, the communist country was breaking up into warring factions, and Zimmermann led U.S. efforts to keep the state together. Bush recalled Zimmermann in 1992 to protest the outbreak of civil war.

Zimmermann resigned from the foreign service in 1994 over what he thought was President Clinton’s refusal to intervene forcefully in the war in Bosnia.

The war lasted until 1995 and pitted Muslims, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats against one another. The war killed 260,000 and forced 1.8 million to flee their homes.

A graduate of Yale who earned his master’s degree at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, Zimmermann joined the foreign service in 1961. He served two stints in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and also was ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. He won the Sharansky award from the Union of Councils of Soviet Jews for his support of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.

His books include “Origins of a Catastrophe,” about his experiences in Yugoslavia, and “First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power,” about U.S. involvement in the Spanish-American War.