Albright: Kosovo, my war and my victory!

CHILDHOOD WITH PREVING BABIT DISLOMAT

Albright: I believe I've presented myself very strong, terrible, what I'm not. But I didn't write these memoaries to boost my image, but to explain how, for any job or any danger, I became the first secretary of state in American history. I also thought this was the most vivid means to make the foreign policy of my state understandable.

• Since childhood, your life has been like a doracy of international history...

Albright: It's true. My life and that of my family is a reflection of the good and evil of the 20th century. Foreign policy has always been in first place in my daily, it represented a strong connection that brought me close to my father, a very serious and strict Czechoslovakian diplomat. As a little girl, I looked at it, not realizing it, taking a hundred steps in our little garden in London with the members of the Czech government in exile.

This has continued, during the time he was in the UN, then during our arrival in Denver, where he was a post-communist professor of influence in our state during the time of the Cold War. Our life in exile, like immigrants, has been exposed to acts of American power. The fact that America wasn't drawn up in Munich, that it went to war against Germany to deliver us, that it has let the Russians invade my country, so everything has changed for our existence.

But, in the end, I have experienced a dream, for an unpleasant return to fate until, being secretary of State, the moment Eastern Europe was released, I have contributed to the accession of these countries in NATO, an organisation born from the fall of the communist state in Prague!

• America has sometimes not been hospitable to you...

Albright: Before I emigrate there, I've always been a stranger. That was the case until I was two years old in Great Britain, where I learned Czech, my mother tongue, and at the same time English. Then in Yugoslavia, Switzerland... in Denver, I was a small, isolated immigrant. We lacked money when I was in a Midwest school and my parents burst out of the style and education that we spent. I felt dead from shame when I watched my mother wander up and down in her latest fashion clothes, in my ethnic fashion time, and my father in a tie and a three - part suit. Moreover, their kitchen made me thick! I always have a joy of telling American students that my father, since I dated a guy, drove us.

• Do you feel that you have felt a fundamental need to reintegration?

“More than that.

Albright: I said this: I love them more than they love me. I'm a guy capable of making friends in the blink of an eye. But later, in my life, I have fought this instinct, remaining locked up in unpopular positions until principled issues were brought into play. The transformation occurred when I entered the UN. Previously, my natural tendency was to enjoy my father, my husband and my patrols. My priority was to stay in the game.

• What a game! You appear to be a political beast, a real network woman...

Albright: What's taken in this story is the way this started... I was a quiet mother, wife of a lively journalist, born of a large family of journalists. By mispronounced to become a journalist and waiting to be a professor, like my father, I had to be distracted by the fundraising, the research fund for my girls' private school. This was happening in Washington, the city of contacts, and this has attracted my efficiency, the capacity to keep my commitments, at the time that I was called for commitment to Senator Muskie's election campaign.

On the other hand, I studied in the doctorate about international relations. How would I have imagined that Zbigniew Brzezinski, my professor in Colombia, to join the National Security Council, run by Jimmy Carter, and register me there? This road is more or less my answer to all who stood around me like the second knife in our home.

• How has Cile Clinton chosen you as US ambassador to the UN?

Albright: I was a longtime member of the democratic reflection circles on the issue of foreign policy and taught Georgetown, where I had been the best professor for four years. Clinton told me this detail was crucial.

• It's known to you art to deliver a message...

Albright: At first this was very scary. I was never a diplomat. Furthermore, I was the only woman, the only dress among the 14 suits of representatives at the UN Security Council. But I represented the United States, and that was enough for me to say something. It was later that I could break away from my prepared texts and find my true style. I remember the screams of anger about my proposals about Cuban pilots who had beat up an activist plane. Only my brochures were messages. I had carried, for the first time, a little snake in response to insults by Saddam Hussein. I set up a small ball that I didn't have an important position and a field while I was a secretary of State. Negocio with the Soviets for the antibalistic missile treaty.

• Do you feel committed to any mission?

Albright: I was always fascinated by the UN by being aware of its changes and difficulties to meet the intimate goals that member states have entrusted to since the coalition's success in Iraq in 1991. I knew, for example, that it is unfair to give the UN the responsibility of failing the operation in Somalia. Then, I suffered about the Rwanda issue, but we had experienced a disaster in Mogadishu and we couldn't be involved easily in Africa. It should be commemorated context: a hostile convention that refused to pay American in the UN, but it mocked inefficiency and called for immediate reform.

• You were indicted by then UN Secretary General Butros Galli, as an emissary political goat...

“FOR MUA, MILOSHIVIA IS T I'm going to be able to talk to you.

Albright: I've felt for him an admiration and genuine perfection, but he has disappointed me in many files, such as Rwanda or Bosnia. Especially, I believe he did not literally understand that his image in the American public was catastrophic. He was viewed as a noxious, unintelligible snob. Butros Gali, since his election, has been committed to fulfilling only one mandate at the UN, and until he began campaigning directly to members of the Security Council to maintain his post, he has contributed to boost his destiny in a chaos that French supporters have not been disfellowshipped. I tried to offer him an honest attitude, but he only listened to his mind.

• Your appointment as secretary of state has coincided with a contradiction: you were accused of wanting to hide, perhaps because of your political ambitions, your Jewish background and the death of grandparents in concentration camps...

Albright: Since my entry into the UN I have begun to accept all kinds of fantastic letters, asking me for money and visas... And then one day, one of them seemed more confidential than others and mentioned my family's history. I'll try to explain better... I didn't grow up with my grandparents. In the 1950 ' s, when anti - Semitism was real, my father and mother had never completely avoided the Holocaust, but they have never made available information that might link it. In school I enrolled as a Catholic... I've suffered a lot because this was all public. The rumors would start flowing when I was trapped in Washington with preliminary auditions at the congress and when I couldn't get back to Prague. I still think about the evening of the president's speech: at this moment, like the first woman of state in American history, I run the presidential cabinet in the middle of nowhere, when an article in the <x0Washington Post” treated me the same day as a liar and was dealt with falsely about my parents!

• The Clinton couple supported you on this. What reports did you hold with them?

Albright: Trustful reactions and admirable sincerity. They are kind and extremely open people. I had met Bill Clinton while I was campaigning for Durakis. Hillary and I, both of us, were deeply committed to our studies at the Women's College in Walesley. She used to come to me in New York while I was at the UN and we exchanged a lot of international issues that we liked talking about. With Bill, I was actually at the stage, and when I trust someone, then I get engaged. That's why I was one of the first to drop the charges against him in the “Transinsky”. I was very disappointed when I learned that he was lying, also when I heard of the soft apologies in front of his staff and cabinet. But well, for the couple... This reveals their privacy. Besides, I can tell you that I've ever had problems with my ex-husband...

• Let's talk about the post of Secretary of State. Colin Powell, then Commander in the Army, shows that you have provoked a breakdown in him?

Albright: (Laughter) At the time, I was in full debate about the role of the army and the use of force. To me, Miloshevqi was a type of bull in the courtyard of recreation. That made me impatient to hear Powell ask me what I would say to a soldier's mother killed in a foreign land battle. That's true, I asked him what his good army is for if no one can use it...

• American offensive in Kosovo is called “Medlin's fight”...

Albright: At first, that wasn't a compliment. There was much going on. I lived through very heavy personal moments when I learned that a bomb had failed its target to hit innocent civilians and that one of our pilots had disappeared. But that has not changed my beliefs: I had seen the faces of refugees and the suffering they suffered, these violent people... In the end, German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer has said a genomic word, referring to the “Medlin fight” and the “Medlin/llahuter”. This was not a victory, but an extraordinary responsibility...

• Is there any logical link between your policy about Iraq and the American invasion there by President Bush's administration?

Albright: In a way, yes. But Bush's government has reversed that logic. I could, for example, give the same speech George Bush made at the UN in 2002 to say Saddam Hussein is a terrible dictator who slaughtered his people and rejected UN resolutions. Our policy was to put him in the bottle, no damage to the state. I'd like to know what urgency this government could have issued to bring him down from power, what connections I haven't been able to see in any way could have found him with al-Qaeda and September 11th, and what an objective danger was the weapons of mass destruction that no one has yet found.

• Does your career represent a victory against machim?

Albright: I voluntarily stopped showing someone some signs of weakness. I never cried, for example, when people today have the right to do so. I've been through the triboones at the point of the sun, fearing that I will now be disturbed and the prejudices of the weak gender will confront. But, basically, it was a little important for my foreign conversationators that I was a woman. I arrived on a big plane on which was the “United States of America” and that meant a lot. curiously, I've lived my biggest disappointments with American colleagues, people who knew me, who had lunched at me, and they couldn't understand how I could have this job and how history can be done. /Telegraphy/