Mr. Kanbar Hossein-Bor – credit, Gov.uk

An Iranian-born British lawyer has made history as the UK’s first High Commissioner to come to the country as a refugee.

Fleeing the post-revolutionary landscape to arrive in Great Britain without a word of English on his lips, Kanbar Hossein-Bor admitted his mother was rather nervous when she first heard he was planning to join the Foreign Office, equivalent of the US State Department.

“In her mind this was a bastion of the establishment, she was a little worried of rejection,” he told the Guardian, adding that her base fear was that he “wasn’t English enough.”

Born to a Balochi family in the tri-national landscape of the arid southeast of Iran where the country shares a border with Afghanistan and Balochistan (Pakistan), his mother fled to the UK, and Kanbar had to be smuggled eastward across the Asian landscape en route to France, and eventually England to start a new life in the quiet seaside town of Southhampton, far from the rural classrooms where he grew up chanting “death to America and Israel” with his classmates.

Now, he becomes the first refugee to hold a position of High Commissioner, a senior UK diplomat who acts as ambassador to other ‘Commonwealth’ nations.

Officially, Mr. Hossein-Bor is the High Commissioner to the Republic of Fiji, non-resident British High Commissioner to the Republic of Kiribati and His Majesty’s non-resident Ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Because these were former British colonial possessions, the UK’s ambassador is titled High Commissioner. A Balochi, Arabic, and Farsi speaker, Hossein-Bor’s “international outlook” was fostered through tales of the Persian Empire, and interactions with other members of his Baloch family.

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A stateless and often suppressed ethnic group of more than 10 million people split between the three countries, the Baloch have at various points over the last 2,000 years ruled themselves through powerful tribal dynasties.

Hossein-Bor told the Guardian that, having received the position, a particularly wild feeling came when realizing that he held the same post as former British imperial officers whose job it was to divide and rule the Baloch tribes, reflecting on Sir Robert Sandeman in particular, who literally wrote the book on the subject which Hossein-Bor has read.

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“For me, to be his administrative successor—one of the great-grandchildren of the tribes— in the same building as him, both of us pursuing British national interests, albeit in a very different time, was quite a moment, because it reflects how the UK has changed, how I’m an instrument of change…”

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