I was 10 years old when the Bosnian war broke out in 1992. My family fled and settled in Malaysia, where I grew up watching the news about the war ravaging my home country. Senior U.S. officials involved in crafting the country’s response to the war quickly became household names in our home and in the Bosnian expatriate community in distant Southeast Asia.
I was 10 years old when the Bosnian war broke out in 1992. My family fled and settled in Malaysia, where I grew up watching the news about the war ravaging my home country. Senior U.S. officials involved in crafting the country’s response to the war quickly became household names in our home and in the Bosnian expatriate community in distant Southeast Asia.
One of those names was Madeleine Albright. As then-US President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, her strength, attitude and eloquence captured our imagination as we all hoped for US intervention in Bosnia.
Albright was one of the most hawkish members of the Clinton administration, and she pushed for more assertive U.S. involvement in Bosnia. As a Central European immigrant to the United States — her family fled communist Czechoslovakia when she was young — Albright knew more about the Balkans and understood the region better than Warren Christopher, then the U.S. secretary of state. As a child, she even spent time live in Belgradewhich was then part of Yugoslavia, while his diplomat father was Czech ambassador to the country.
In 1994, she traveled to Sarajevo to open the American embassy in the besieged Bosnian capital and memorably declared: “Ya sam Sarajevka” or “I am a Sarajevan”, echoing the famous declaration of the former US President John F. Kennedy “Ich bin ein Berliner”. Albright’s visit remains remembered many years later.
By 1999, Albright had become secretary of state, and Slobodan Milosevic, then a Serbian strongman, had launched his fourth war: this time in Kosovo, after the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. The Clinton administration’s learning curve regarding the Balkans has led it to be far more willing to use force this time around. Additionally, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then-French President Jacques Chirac were more supportive of a joint humanitarian intervention. The convergence of these factors meant that Kosovo Albanians would not be left alone.
I remember very well TimeIt is Cover page in May of that year, with a photo of Albright on a cell phone and the headline “Albright at War.” Of all the Clinton administration officials, only Albright gave the impression that she understood Milosevic for what he really was: a dictator bent on territorial expansion and the dream of a “Greater Serbia.” Her own experience as a refugee, her experience living in the Balkans as a child, and her training as a political scientist prepared her well to confront the grave threat to European security in the 1990s.
The war in Bosnia and the international diplomacy to end it sparked my interest in international affairs. When, several years later, I won a scholarship to study a master’s degree at Georgetown University, I was grateful for the opportunity to meet at least one former Clinton administration official who taught there . (There were several, including former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, whose course I also took.) I enrolled in Albright’s course “The National Security Toolkit America” in 2007 – not only for the course itself, but also to take the measure of history. figure who shaped United States policy in Bosnia.
I read Albright’s 2003 memoir Madam Secretary as preparation for the course. The impression I got from her memoir was that she was keenly aware that Clinton should have intervened sooner to end the war in Bosnia. However, she was personally invested in safeguarding Clinton’s legacy and was therefore reluctant to express any doubts she might have had regarding this foreign policy challenge that had plagued Clinton’s first term.
In class, Albright set about discussing the variety of American power instruments available. Then as now, Iran’s nuclear program loomed large, and she asked a class of 20 graduate students to simulate possible international responses to a potential crisis. Albright frequently asked students for our opinions on current readings and issues before giving his opinion, which was usually very insightful.
However, his memories, his anecdotes and his lively wit were much more interesting than his lectures. At the time, in 2007, she was also working tirelessly on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential primary campaign in Iowa and made trips there. She relished the idea of America electing its first female president. Not one to mince words, Albright recalled at one point how some members of the male-dominated foreign policy team during Bill Clinton’s first term had looked down on her. Her support for women leaders in public life was passionate and deeply influenced by her generation’s experience of breaking glass ceilings.
Albright had a few quiet anecdotes that she liked to share, but I remember one in particular about Bosnia. After leaving his office, Albright stood in line at a Chicago airport. A security guard recognized her, approached her and introduced himself as a Bosnian American, thanking her for everything she had done for Bosnia. He asked to take a photo with Albright while others in line looked on. A lady right behind her asked what was going on. “He’s from Bosnia and, you know, I was secretary of state,” Albright said. “Wow, you were the Secretary of State of Bosnia!” the woman exclaimed.
At the end of the semester, Albright invited our class to her home in Georgetown for lunch – a gesture that all of us who attended will certainly remember for many years to come. She told us how her house had been chosen as a secret location for a meeting a few years earlier between the then Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards to strike a deal for the Democratic ticket in 2004.
What was evident after a semester in Albright’s class was his sharp mind and unwavering purpose in life. Although deeply aware of her history of breaking the glass ceiling, Albright did not once seem content to conclude her legacy.
In the United States, Albright is remembered as the first foreign-born female secretary of state. In the Czech Republic, she is the favorite girl who reached the top of American diplomacy. In Bosnia and Kosovo, Albright is fondly remembered as a staunch advocate of assertive American diplomacy that ended Milosevic’s wars of conquest.
I will remember Albright as both a policy maker and a teacher. As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then as the country’s top diplomat, Albright embodied the good that America represented in the 1990s among my generation of Bosniaks growing up amid the war. As a teacher, Albright had both the clarity of ideas and the eloquence to convey them. Her quick wit, excellent memory and sense of humor made her a formidable presence in the classroom. Today, as I teach international relations to my own students in Sarajevo, I frequently reference Albright and other Bosnian hawks of the 1990s.
But more than a private lesson, I will cherish the opportunity I had to spend time with the 64th Secretary of State of the United States and a historical figure from a region close to mine. To paraphrase former US President Barack Obama, it was only in America that Albright’s story was possible.
