During his work for the White House, he highlighted his role in the crises due to the genocide in Rwanda and the peace agreements for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton as president and US ambassador to the UN, has died at the age of 84, her family said. She tough diplomatic, she had to ride with the major tensions of the ’90s.
Born in Prague in 1937 and descendant of Jewish parents, the young Madeleine knew exile twice. Her family fled from Hitler, after the Nazi invasion of their country. Later – after the Second World War – they had to flee from the communist regime. “I have always valued people’s attachment to their roots, because I suffered the trauma of having them ripped out of me when I was a child.”
Before taking the reins of US diplomacy, between 1997 and 2001, she was the US ambassador to the United Nations. During her tenure as Secretary of State she had to become involved in the two biggest foreign policy crises of the 1990s: the genocides in Rwanda and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. From the latter, she highlighted her role in achieving the Dayton peace accords. Later, he appeared before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where he became the highest-ranking American personality to testify in The Hague, recalling the crimes committed in Bosnia, comparing them to the atrocities committed during World War II and calling as “disgusting” the ethnic superiority of the Serbs.
Years later, the also former ambassador acknowledged that she had never understood why her country declared war on Iraq. And it is that she was always convinced that «the problem was in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein was a torturer, but he was no threat.’
In her book ‘Madeleine Albright. Memories. The most powerful woman in the United States ‘, she defended that the attack on Iraq “was an option, not a necessity”. She argued that Saddam Hussein “should have been tried in an international court, just as Milosevic was”.
His term with Bill Clinton also highlights his trip to North Korea in October 2000. There he met with President Kim Jong-il, father of the current president Kim Jong-un, to deliver a letter from Clinton to heal rivalries of steel that have bled their country during the 20th century, with the Korean and Vietnam wars. And to good that he got the attention of Jong-Il, something unprecedented until that moment and currently unlikely to be repeated.
#Madeleine #Albright #secretary #state #Clinton #dies