André Adam, Retired Diplomat and Brussels Victim

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/world/europe/andre-adam-retired-diplomat-and-brussels-victim.html

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BRUSSELS — André Adam, then Belgium’s ambassador to the United Nations, displayed some of what his family called characteristic good cheer at a Belgian festival in New York in 2000.

“The real ambassador,” Mr. Adam told a reporter, “is the beer.”

Mr. Adam’s post to the United Nations was his last before retiring from a long career as a diplomat, including a posting as ambassador to the United States in the 1990s.

Born in Brussels in 1936, Mr. Adam began his foreign service career in Cuba in the 1960s. It was in that role that he met his wife, Danielle, according to a statement posted on Facebook by his family.

Mr. Adam, 79, was on his way to the United States on Tuesday when he was killed in the terrorist attack at Brussels Airport.

His last act was to shield his wife from the blasts, his family said. Mrs. Adam was seriously injured in the attack, according to Belgian media reports.

Mr. Adam served as Belgium’s ambassador in Algeria from 1986 to 1990 and then in Zaire from 1990 to 1991.

He served in Paris, London and Los Angeles, where he was the consul general from 1982 to 1986, the period including the 1984 Olympic Games.

He had seen the caustic effects of political conflict before: attacks in London as tensions escalated with Irish republicans, in Algeria, and in Lubumbashi, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. “He was saddened by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Algiers, then a horrified witness to the massacres in Lubumbashi in the ’90s,” the family said.

After Mr. Adam retired, he and his wife moved to the southwest of France in Gers, where he spent his time helping to restore the old fortress in Larressingle.

“All his life he had worked towards the peaceful resolution of conflict in the world,” his family wrote.