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WASHINGTON (AFP) — Tom Lantos, a Hungarian born-Holocaust survivor, outspoken global human rights advocate and veteran Democratic foreign affairs expert, died Monday, a month after announcing he had cancer.

California representative Lantos, who had just turned 80, was surrounded by his family when he died Monday morning in Bethesda naval hospital north of Washington, his spokeswoman Lynne Weil said.

He died from complications of cancer of the esophagus, which he said last month would force his retirement from the House of Representatives, where he had served since being elected in 1980 and latterly chaired the chamber’s Foreign Affairs committee.

When he announced his diagnosis, Lantos, expressed his “profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”

“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,” he said.

Tributes quickly poured in for Lantos, from across the political aisle.

President George W. Bush hailed him as a “champion” of human rights.

“As the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, Tom was a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men,” Bush said in a statement issued from the White House, where flags were lowered to half-staff.

Hillary and Bill Clinton remembered the “courageous and improbable journey” of Lantos’s life.

“Tom bore witness to the worst of human cruelty and devoted his life to stopping it,” the Clintons said in a statement.

Clinton’s Democratic White House rival Barack Obama honored Lantos’s “truly extraordinary life” in which he “never wavered in his defense of freedom and opposition to tyranny.”

House speaker Nancy Pelosi said the veteran congressman’s passing was a “terrible loss” while the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen described Lantos as an “unfailingly gracious and courageous man.”

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family in February 1928, Lantos was 16 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. As a teenager, he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance, and later of the anti-Communist student movement.

After the Soviets invaded Hungary, he discovered that most of his family had died in the Holocaust. By 1947, he was in the United States on an academic scholarship and became an economics professor in San Francisco.

Since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 elections, Lantos has used his committee to launch strident appeals for greater US action on human rights in China, Darfur, Myanmar and Russia.

Under his stewardship, the committee voted in October to describe the mass slaughter of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as “genocide” — plunging US relations with Turkey into crisis.

Lantos had also emerged as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and warned last June “Russia’s tactics under the KGB colonel now in charge of the Kremlin threaten to send the country back to its authoritarian past.”