While researching about famous and influential Czech, I came across Madeline Albright. I wrote an entry about her on my Prague Travel site and decided to include it here because of her political link to Bosnia.

Madeline Albright, born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague in 1937, was former UN’s ambassador and USA’s Secretary of State under Bill Clinton’s second administration. Her family left Czechoslovakia in 1939 when Nazi took over the country.

Only much later in her adulthood, she discovered her Jewish root and learned that her relatives died in concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland and Terezin, Czech Republic.

“During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her perceived personal anti-Serb position and her role in participating in the formulation of U.S. policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans.” [wiki]

Her involvement in the Yugoslavia’s conflict prompt her to acquire a good speaking and reading Serbian beside German and Polish, in additional to her fluency in English, Czech, French and Russian.

Question: If you are a Serb, what was your opinion of Albright at the time and is it true that she was perceived as anti-Serb? Thanks!

In 2006, she released a memoir, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. The book is available in paperback , audio download, or CD rental.