MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, 1ST FEMALE SECRETARY OF STATE, DEAD AT 84

Thu 24 March 2022:

Madeleine Albright, the first female US secretary of state, died at the age of 84, according to her family. She fled the Nazis as a youngster in her native Czechoslovakia during World War II.

Albright was a tough-talking diplomat in a US administration that avoided getting involved in the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the two major foreign policy crises of the 1990s.

“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 on Wednesday.

US President Joe Biden paid tribute to Albright, saying she was a “force for goodness, grace, and decency – and for freedom”.

“When I think of Madeleine, I will always remember her fervent faith that ‘America is the indispensable nation’,” he said in a statement.

Albright, who was born in former Czechoslovakia in 1937, was nominated to become the first female secretary of state, and confirmed unanimously in 1997. She was in the post until 2001.

After a UN-commissioned study found that more than 500,000 Iraqi children had died in Iraq as a result of US-led sanctions after the first Gulf war, Albright defended the policy in an interview in 1996.

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it,” Albright, who was serving as envoy to the UN, said when asked about the deaths of the Iraqi children.

In 2004, she told Democracy Now that she regretted making that comment.

“It was a stupid statement. I never should have made it, and if everybody else that has ever made a statement they regret would stand up, there would be a lot of people standing,” Albright said.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003, Albright said the invasion was justified, based on allegations that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction. But she argued that the country did not pose an immediate threat to the US and called for keeping focus on defeating al-Qaeda.

She would later come out forcefully against the war. “Iraq is going to go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy,” she told Al Jazeera in a 2007 interview.

“Madeline Albright was one of my earliest lessons in the bankruptcy of identity politics. It doesn’t matter if you are the first anything if your politics perpetuate the status quo of racial violence, imperial war making, and capitalist extraction/exploitation,” Palestinian-American author and activist Noura Erakat wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price called Albright a “trailblazer” on Wednesday.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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