Albright Honored in Her Hometown

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, basking in a warm homecoming to her native city, accepted the Czech Republic’s highest civilian award Monday, welcomed the country into NATO and peppered her speeches with the Czech language.

Clearly enjoying herself, she sang the U.S. national anthem lustily at the end of a speech in Prague’s art nouveau municipal building and declared the Czech Republic to be a member of the free world now and forever.

In her speech to an invited audience, Albright spoke mostly in English, although she repeated key sections in Czech.

“Nothing compares to the feeling of coming to my original home, Prague, as secretary of State of the United States, for the purpose of saying to you: Welcome home. . . . You are coming home, in fact, to the community of freedom that you never left in spirit.”

She added: “For 50 years, you looked to the free world for support, understanding and recognition. Now you are the free world; other nations will look to you for support.”

Gesturing to Czech President Vaclav Havel, who watched the speech from a special presidential box, Albright said, “Truth does conquer, after all.” This was a reference to the motto “Truth Conquers” that appears on the presidential crest; they are the words of Jan Hus, a theologian and Czech national hero.

Nevertheless, Albright had a few words of stern advice for the Czechs, who were selected last week with Poland and Hungary to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by the end of this century.

“I trust you will also be leaders in the effort to keep deadly weapons from dangerous rogue states, even if it means losing a sale from time to time,” she said. The Czech Republic, with a large conventional arms industry left over from the days when it armed the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, has sold weaponry to Iraq and other countries Washington is trying to isolate, explaining that it cannot accept restrictions on its best export industry.

Albright also noted that the Prague government has not yet brought its armed forces up to NATO standards. She said much modernization is needed, and she urged the Czech government to increase its military budget in the coming years.

Havel, who held a joint news conference with Albright, said the vital first step in upgrading the army is to win “public confidence and public support” for a military that in the Communist days was reviled by the public. He said modernizing the army’s weaponry--probably the most costly challenge of integrating the Czech Republic into NATO--will have to wait its turn.

*

Albright humiliated a State Department translator who failed to satisfy her with his Czech version of her words at the news conference. As the translator, Ivo Reznick, struggled with part of her opening statement, Albright cut him off. “Not exactly,” she said sharply and gave the Czech version herself.

She corrected Reznick several more times before he fell back and allowed Havel’s translator to handle both speakers.

On Sunday night, Albright made an emotional visit to the Prague synagogue where the names of two of her grandparents appear on a wall among the names of 77,297 Czechs who died in the Holocaust.

She said nothing Monday of her recently discovered Jewish heritage; it was a day of secular celebration for the Czech girl who made good in the United States.

In a brief ceremony at Hradcany Castle, Havel awarded her the Order of the White Lion, the country’s most prestigious civilian award. After the president draped over her shoulder the red-and-gold sash imprinted with a red cross and jeweled rosette, she kissed him on the cheek.

The inscription said that Albright was recognized “for especially outstanding endeavor to the benefit of the Czech Republic.”

Dagmar Simova, Albright’s 66-year-old first cousin, was in the first row for the ceremony. Simova, the daughter of a sister of Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, spent World War II in England with the Korbel family, treated as if she were Madeleine’s older sister.

She returned to Prague with the Korbel family after the war but was left there when the Korbels again fled into exile in the face of the Communist takeover. In interviews earlier this year, Simova spoke of being abandoned by the Korbels and suggested that Albright was trying to ignore her. State Department officials insist, however, that the cousins now talk regularly.