Jan Pronk Former Minister of Environment Former Special Representative of the Secretary General Head of Mission, UN Mission in Sudan The Netherlands "Development and Conflict" dinner speech

Short biography:

I was born in 1940 (March 16) in Scheveningen, The Netherlands. My nationality is Dutch.

After having finished my study economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam I became research assistant of Prof. Jan Tinbergen at the same university. In the seventies I became a politician: member of parliament for the Social-Democratic Party (Partij van de Arbeid) and Minister for Development Cooperation. In the first half of the eighties I worked as an international civil servant for the United Nations (UNCTAD) in Geneva.
Thereafter I returned to Dutch politics and became again Minister for Development Cooperation and later Minister of Environment. I left Dutch politics in 2002 and was appointed as Professor at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS - www.iss.nl) in The Hague. From mid 2004 until the end of 2006 I have lived in Khartoum as the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Sudan, where I was leading the UN peace keeping operation (UNMIS) See: www.unmis.org.

My main professional interests are sustainable development and international relations. My hobbies are fitness (running, swimming, ski-ing), reading and archiving.

I am married to Tineke Zuurmond. We have two children. Our daughter, Carin, has studied economics in Rotterdam. Presently she is working at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. She is married to Paco Tur Hartmann. They have a daughter, Carolina. Our son, Rochus, studied law in Utrecht and Washington. He is a diplomat and has worked in that capacity in Shanghai, Brussels, Kabul, Ramallah and, most recently, Uruzgan, Afghanistan.

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Last updated: 18 Dec 2007