Madeleine Albright has died at the age of 84

Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during the second World War but rose to become the first female US secretary of state, died on Wednesday at the age of 84, her family said.

“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,” her family said on Twitter on Wednesday.

A tough-talking diplomat, Albright, who was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1937, was confirmed unanimously as the first woman US secretary of state in 1997. She was in the post until 2001.

Her experience as a refugee prompted her to push for the US to be a superpower which used that clout. She wanted a “muscular internationalism”, said James O’Brien, a senior adviser to Ms Albright during the Bosnian war.

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She once upset a Pentagon chief by asking why the military maintained more than 1 million men and women under arms if it never used them.

She became the US ambassador to the UN in 1993. Early in the Clinton administration, while she unsuccessfully advocated for a quicker, stronger response in Bosnia, Ms Albright backed a UN war crimes tribunal that eventually put the architects of the Bosnian war, including Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leaders, in jail, Mr O’Brien said.

The plain-spoken Albright took a tough line on a 1996 incident where Cuban jet fighters downed two unarmed US-based planes, saying: “This is not cojones, this is cowardice,” using a Spanish vulgarity meaning “testicles”.

The painful lessons learned in crises in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s informed the US response in Kosovo in the late ’90s, when Serbs began a programme of ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians. Nato responded with an 11-week campaign of air strikes in 1999 that extended to Belgrade.

During efforts to press North Korea to end its nuclear weapons programme, which were eventually unsuccessful, Ms Albright travelled to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, becoming the highest ranking US official to visit the secretive country.

Once the Clinton years and the 1990s were over, Ms Albright became a figure of adoration for a generation of young women looking for inspiration in their quest for opportunity and respect in the workplace. Ms Albright was fond of saying: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” – Reuters