Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has died of cancer. She succumbed to cancer on Wednesday surrounded by family and friends, her family said in a statement shared via Albright’s 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 a government 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.
As a child, Albright fled her native Czechoslovakia from the Nazis during World War II. She was born Marie Jana (known as Madlenka) Korbelova on May 15, 1937 in Prague, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family of diplomats. After German troops invaded, the family first emigrated to England, where Albright, unaware of her Jewish origins, was raised as a Catholic.
