Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo, the Italian who managed Kabul airport during the crisis

Newswire

Bangkok: “The runway of the HKIA #Kabul international airport is open. I see airplanes landing and taking off ”. With a dry post on Twitter where he shares the most beautiful photos of his Rome and pets, career diplomat Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo, born in 1957, seems like a spectator rather than a protagonist as all the world’s media describe him.
He writes from the deck of a retreating NATO ship, and he is the Senior Civil Representative, not of Italy which is his country, but of the entire alliance. He remained even when France, Germany and Italy itself brought back the ambassadors.

Few outside the international diplomatic world know him but it was Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg who chose him among many other candidates more than a year ago, at the end of his term as Italian ambassador to Pakistan.

Ambassador Pontecorvo’s tweet seemed to send a reassuring message for those who can read it, the 14 percent of the population who have the Internet. It meant that, if the flights continue, there will also be hopes of evacuation for the most delicate humanitarian cases, especially for the families of translators, assistants and NATO personnel.
Married with a daughter, the Ambassador was born in Bangkok to a father who was also a diplomat and grew up between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He knows well the people and the mentality of ancient populations among which he grew up although as a privileged one.

Together with the American school, Ambassador Pontecorvo attended that of the city of Tarbela where his father consul was in charge of an Italian company that was building the first large clay dam in the world, then he went with his family to Kabul, where he returned to an armchair that hot.