The Iraq war had gone on for six months when Gil Loescher, a scholar and champion of refugees’ rights, arrived in Baghdad in August 2003 as a member of openDemocracy, a London-based human rights organization. On Aug. 19, he and others went to the United Nations headquarters there to discuss the humanitarian costs of the war with Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq.
Moments after they arrived, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.N. compound and detonated them just below Mr. Vieira de Mello’s third-floor office window. Floors collapsed, pinning him and Mr. Loescher under the rubble alongside each other. But Mr. Vieira de Mello was able to use his cellphone to contact rescue workers and direct them to their location.
Mr. Loescher was pulled out by two firefighters, but not before a hasty amputation of both legs had to be performed. The firefighters “had nothing except a pocketknife to do that,” Mr. Loescher wrote in an account on openDemocracy’s website.
“They also found an old rusty saw in the building,” he added, “and that’s how they did the amputations.”
By the time rescue workers returned for Mr. Vieira de Mello, one of the world’s most respected diplomats, he had died. Medical workers said later that Mr. Loescher survived because he had been pinned upside down, preventing a lethal loss of blood.
At least 22 people were killed in the explosion, and more than 100 were wounded. Of the seven people in the room with Mr. Loescher, only he survived.
He was flown to a U.S. military hospital in Germany, where doctors gave him only a 25 percent chance of survival. But, defying the odds, he was recovering at home by the end of October.
The next year, his daughter Margaret Loescher, who was a film student at the time, released “Pulled From the Rubble,” a documentary she produced and directed that chronicles her father’s painful trials of recovery.
If the attack maimed Mr. Loescher and left him in a wheelchair, it did not deter him from continuing his work. A longtime collaborator with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he kept traveling the world visiting refugee camps and helping to shape U.N. policies on the displaced.
Mr. Loescher died on April 28 in Oxford, England, where he had lived periodically throughout his life. He was 75. Margaret Loescher said the cause was heart failure.
In addition to her, he is survived by his wife, Ann Dull Loescher, who collaborated with him on books about refugee rights, and another daughter, Claire Loescher.
As soon as his recovery allowed, Mr. Loescher returned to his work, analyzing the implications of the U.N. headquarters attack. In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times a year after the bombing, he wrote that humanitarian workers had “increasingly become the targets of violence in war-torn countries.”
“In the global war on terror, the line between humanitarian activity and military activity has become blurred,” he asserted. “During the past year in Afghanistan, for example, American soldiers have frequently worn civilian clothing, carried guns and distributed food. As a result, humanitarian work has become confused with security operations — leading to the perception there that relief agencies are simply an arm of the occupying forces.”
“Simply put,” he added, “the military ought to proe security for humanitarian organizations and help them get their aid where it needs to go — and then take a back seat.”
Gilburt Damien Loescher was born on March 7, 1945, in San Francisco to Burt and Helene (Aachen) Loescher. His father was a farmer and a businessman. Gil grew to be 6 feet 7 inches tall and played basketball at St. Mary’s College of California, in the Bay Area, on a full athletic scholarship.
He went on to the London School of Economics for postgraduate study and, while writing his doctoral dissertation on the Vietnam War, traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia. There he encountered refugee crises firsthand — an experience that moved him to dedicate his career to understanding the displaced and the policies that determine their futures.
In 1975, after receiving his Ph.D., he began what would become a 25-year run as a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. The position did not stifle his mission, however; he routinely traveled the world to better acquaint himself with the conditions of refugee camps, and to press for change in lectures and writings.
With John A. Scanlan, a professor emeritus of law at Indiana University Bloomington, Mr. Loescher wrote “Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present.” Published in 1987, the book is regarded as a trenchant and influential analysis of the politics of refugee admission in the United States.
“This book fills a need; it is the first comprehensive historical survey of the U.S. government’s policies toward the admission of refugees from all regions of the world since World War II,” the historian Gaddis Smith wrote in his review for Foreign Affairs. “The ‘calculation’ in the kindness refers to the admission of refugees from communist countries as a way of underlining a political message.”
James Milner, an associate professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa who accompanied Mr. Loescher on many of his missions, said that “before his work, the way we thought about refugees was just a legal issue.” But, he said, Mr. Loescher showed that it was a political one as well.
Visiting refugee camps in Northeastern Kenya in 2001, Mr. Loescher had a revelation. He “realized the refugees had been in exile for more than a decade,” Professor Milner said, and “were dealing with a new kind of situation.”
Mr. Loescher would call them “protracted refugees,” a term he coined to describe those who have been separated from their homes for more than five consecutive years. He began to study these long-term encampments in earnest, and the U.N. refugee agency drew on his research in formulating policies on handling them.
Though the attack in Baghdad had left him disabled, Mr. Loescher was determined to continue his travels and research. In 2006, for example, he traveled to a camp on the border of Thailand and Myanmar.
