Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War Two but rose to become the first female US secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died yesterday at the age of 84, her family said.
Albright, a tough-talking diplomat in an administration that hesitated to involve itself in the two biggest foreign policy crises of the 1990s — the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“We are heartbroken to announce that Dr Madeleine K Albright, the 64th US Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today. The cause was cancer,” the family said on Twitter.
Albright, who had become the US ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, had pressed for a tougher line against the Serbs in Bosnia. But during President Bill Clinton’s first term, many of the administration’s top foreign policy experts vividly remembered how the United States became bogged down in Vietnam and were determined to not repeat that error in the Balkans.
The United States responded by working with Nato on airstrikes that forced an end to the war but only after it had been going on for three years.
Madeleine Albright
