Albright was the first woman secretary of state in Bill Clinton’s cabinet from 1997 to 2001. She died of cancer at the age of 84.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has died of cancer at the age of 84. She succumbed to cancer on Wednesday surrounded by family and friends, her family said in a statement shared via Albright’s verified Twitter account. Albright became the first woman to head the State Department in Washington under Democratic US President Bill Clinton. She held the post from 1997 to 2001.
Albright was a feisty diplomat in an administration reluctant to get involved in the major foreign policy crises of the 1990s – the Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina genocides. When the US House of Representatives passed a resolution in April 2000 expressing its “deep regret” about the participation of the FPÖ in the Austrian government, Albright pointed out that the government was formed “by means of a democratic election” and “measured by its deeds ” should be.
Her autobiography, which was published in 2020, is entitled “Hell and Other Travel Destinations”. Albright explained the title at the time: “I repeated the sentence ‘Hell holds a place for women who don’t help other women’ so often that Starbucks had it printed on a coffee mug.”
This was also the phrase at a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign rally in Concord, a town in the state of New Hampshire, three days before the Democratic presidential primary. Albright received a shitstorm on social media for her words and also regrets her statement. “Encouraging women to help other women? Always a good thing. Telling a woman who votes for a man she’s going to hell for it? Not so smart.”
Efforts for Kosovo
Albright was always in favor of getting things done, even when things went wrong – as in the summer of 2000, when Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, at the Camp David country estate with Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak, failed to achieve peace in the Middle East. In the winter of 1999, in Rambouillet near Paris, the minister sought a peace solution for Kosovo with daring shuttle diplomacy between Serbs and Albanians, but this effort ultimately only led to NATO’s air warfare against Yugoslavia.
“Hell” is Kosovo diplomacy, she complained at the time. She did not escape unscathed. With the airstrikes, anonymous accusations were made against them that they had misjudged the situation. It was a difficult time for the academic and politician, who had already represented the superpower as chief delegate to the United Nations in New York from 1993 to 1997 and caused a stir with her mercilessly direct style. As a minister, she then conquered the front pages of the world press in the style of a daredevil. She has become a cosmopolitan star who speaks French, Russian and Czech in addition to English.
Invasion would ‘seal Putin’s dishonor’
Shortly before her death, Albright found harsh words for Russian President Vladimir Putin, one day before Russia’s war of aggression began. “An invasion of Ukraine would not pave Russia’s path to greatness, but seal Mr. Putin’s dishonor by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable to a stronger, unified Western alliance,” she wrote in a guest post in the ” New York Times”. If Mr. Putin feels cornered, he can only blame himself. Albright said Ukraine has a right to its sovereignty regardless of who its neighbors are. “In the modern age, big countries accept that, and Mr. Putin has to accept that too.”
Albright was born Madeleine Jana Korbel on May 15, 1937, the daughter of a Czechoslovakian diplomat in Prague. When she was eleven, the family relocated to the United States. While the political science professor’s career went straight up, her 1959 marriage to journalist Joseph Albright ended in divorce in 1983. The connection resulted in three daughters. She experienced one of the greatest personal surprises not long before the end of her four-year term as Foreign Minister in January 2001: she learned that she was of Jewish descent and that her paternal grandparents were among the victims of the Holocaust. Her parents had converted to Catholicism and had kept the real background from her.
After her tenure as Secretary of State ended in 2001, Albright was determined to make the next chapter of her life “even more exciting” than the previous one. “And so with all the plans, I said, ‘Hell, yeah.’ She worked as a university lecturer, ran a consulting firm in Washington, was committed to promoting democracy and empowering women, traveled extensively, gave speeches and was a sought-after commentator on international politics Taking stock: “Not now, I’m far too busy for that. Unless the hearse takes me away, I’ll continue.”
(APA/Archyde.com/dpa)