Morton I. Abramowitz, a longtime U.S. diplomat who made refugee and humanitarian concerns a focal point of American foreign policy during his tenure, died on Friday at his home in Washington. He was 91.

His son, Michael, confirmed the death.

Blessed with an impatient implacability rarely found among diplomats, Mr. Abramowitz repeatedly broke with the foreign policy establishment, both as a career Foreign Service officer and later as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

His first chance to assert himself came in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter named him ambassador to Thailand.

It was a fraught moment in Southeast Asia: The region was still coping with the fallout from the Vietnam War, while the genocide in Cambodia — and that country’s invasion by Vietnam in 1978 — sent some one million refugees fleeing to the Thai border.

Mr. Abramowitz, sensing an impending famine, leaped into the fray, sending embassy staff to the border to monitor conditions and creating a group to coordinate relief efforts. He persuaded Thailand to take most of the refugees, but he also won a commitment from Washington for the U.S. to take some as well.

“He was this extraordinarily dynamic force who came across as much as an ambassador for the refugees as for the United States,” Mark Malloch-Brown, a British diplomat who was working in Thailand for the United Nations at the time, said in an interview.

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