Albright: Kosovo, which I am most proud of in life

At that time, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright may be considered the main driver for the military intervention decision.

In an interview for the BBC, Albright has remembered her experience with Kosovo's war and meetings with Slobodan Milosevic, public television broadcast.

Albright says lobby for launching military intervention in Kosovo is the work she feels most proud of in her career.

When they ask me what the thing I'm proud of is, of course Kosovo. We couldn't allow that, it was genocide. Ethnic cleansing was taking place. People were getting out of their homes, not for what they had done, but for who they were. I thought it would make sense for the U.S. to use our influence on others to stop this ethnic cleansing”, she relates.

The former American State Secretary remembers Milosevic as a cruel and confident man himself, to the extent that he managed to remove her typical smile from an American who shakes hands at an official meeting.

Milosevic's “Actions, which was a hypernationalist, and had decided that he had decided to get rid of people who were different from his model of Serbian nationalism, made me think we had to do something.

He looked like someone who thought he was very attractive and smart.

He was very sure of himself. He thought of himself as an elegant man, but what he was doing was not elegant at all.

It is impossible for an American to shake hands without smiling, but when I saw it in Belgrade, I was determined not to smile.

My photographs of that time show this”, Albright remembers.