Who was Madeleine Albright, first female US Secretary of State

There is a video from UNHCR, the UN refugee agency a few years ago. Madeleine Albright appears in this video, not because of her political role, but because she herself is a refugee. The first woman to hold the role of Secretary of State in the United States, who died at 84 of a tumor, was born in Prague, in today’s Czech Republic, and had fled first from the Nazi invaders and then from the Communist government. She was still called Marie Jana Korbelova when she arrived in the United States in 1948 where she took the name of Madeleine and then the surname Albright of her husband, an American publisher, married in 1959, from whom she separated in 1982 and with whom she had three daughters.

He was two years old in 1939 when the Czechoslovakia it was invaded by Hitler’s Germany. The first move to London, then the return home and the final farewell when the Communist Party came to power. Her family had origins Jews, but his parents had chosen conversion to Catholicism as a form of protection. 26 members of his family were victims of the Holocaust. She only found out when she got to America. Her father had been a diplomat and then a political scientist at the University of Denver where he studied Condoleezza Rice, who, like her, was at the helm of US foreign policy.

His entire academic, diplomatic and political career, on the democratic side, has been in international relations. She was first an analyst, then a White House advisor, since the days of Carter and national security under the presidency of Bill Clintonwho then made her the first woman to head US diplomacy during her second presidential term, from 1997 to 2000, without forgetting the role of US ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 when she clashed with the little interventionist, in her opinion, Secretary Boutros-Ghali.

Its positive and negative presence marked years of US foreign policy and not only between the end of the Cold War and 11 September. From the Rwandashe herself had the regret for not having stopped the massacres in the clash between Hutu and Tutsi, at Bosnia. He was one of the most authoritative voices in favor of the US and NATO intervention, whose expansion he wanted, in the Balkans to stop ethnic cleansing. He wanted the international war crimes tribunal for former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.

He also supported the reduction of nuclear weapons. For her, the US was the indispensable nation in diplomacy, capable of defending the true democratic values. As often happens to those who lead American foreign policy, it seems to have appeared more hawk than dove. Its the first trip of a senior US government member to North Korea. Under his foreign leadership there were also the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the first sign of a terrorism that would also hit New York.

One of his editorial on New York Times of 23 February last she spoke of totalitarianisms, those from which she had fled, now in a new form, that of Putin. “Like other despots, he equates his welfare with that of the nation and considers any form of opposition treason. Instead of paving the way for the great Russia, the invasion of Ukraine will mark Putin’s infamy, leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically in trouble and strategically vulnerable to a stronger and more united Western alliance ”. She had been the first to meet him in 2000 and had framed him perfectly: “embarrassed by the collapse of the USSR and determined to restore the greatness of his country”.

Madeleine Albright has always supported female power and cooperation. She said that there is a place in hell for women who don’t help each other. Like Queen Elizabeth she spoke through what she wore. Of her His brooches they were messages and he had even written a book about this. Her favorite was in the shape of a snake with reference to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein who had called her an unprecedented snake. How the day would go was clear from the pin of the day: good for the flowers, bad for the animals.