Iran Press/America: The Guardian reported that Madeleine Albright, who came to the US as a refugee and made history as the first woman to be secretary of state, has died. She was 84.
A family statement read: “We are heartbroken to announce that Dr Madeleine Albright, the 64th US secretary of state … passed away earlier today.”
“The cause was cancer. She was surrounded by family and friends. We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend.”
US President Joe Biden saluted Albright as “a force for goodness, grace, and decency – and for freedom”.
“Hers were the hands that turned the tide of history,” the president said.
Bill Clinton, the president Albright served, paid tribute to “one of the finest secretaries of state, an outstanding UN ambassador, a brilliant professor and an extraordinary human being”.
Born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague in 1937 but known as Madeleine since infancy, Albright fled with her family for London in 1939 after the Nazis took Czechoslovakia. She came to the US in 1948.
She was raised Catholic and only decades later discovered her parents were Jewish and that several family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
After the election of Clinton in 1992, Albright was first ambassador to the United Nations, then secretary of state. The dominant foreign policy themes of the time were the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the years before 9/11.
Albright became secretary of state in 1997, then the highest-ranking woman in the history of US government. It made her fourth in line to the presidency, though like her predecessors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski she would not have been able to fill the role, not being a natural born US citizen as defined in the Constitution.
The state department spokesperson, Ned Price, said: “The impact that Secretary Albright ... had on this building is felt every single day in just about every single corridor. She was a trailblazer.”
Ben Rhodes, a former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, said: “Madeleine Albright was always exceedingly generous to and encouraging of younger people coming up in national security … she always extended a hand, opened her home and shared her wisdom.”
Val Demings, a Florida congresswoman and Senate candidate, called Albright “not only a … breaker of glass ceilings [but] a brilliant, passionate, dedicated public servant”.
Bill Clinton said “few leaders have been so perfectly suited for the times in which they served” and called Albright “a passionate force for freedom, democracy and human rights”.
Hillary Clinton, a successor as secretary of state, recalled Albright’s “unfailingly wise counsel” and said: “So many people around the world are alive and living better lives because of her service.”
In 2012, Albright was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Bestowing the award,Barack Obama, former U.S. President said: “Once, at a naturalisation ceremony, an Ethiopian man came up to [Albright] and said, ‘Only in America can a refugee meet the secretary of state.’
Bill Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, saluted “a foreign-born foreign minister who understood first-hand the importance of free societies for peace in our world”.
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