Madeleine Albright honours Czech journalist
The former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was back in her native city of Prague over the weekend, this time as an elder stateswoman rather than in the fray of the NATO summit itself. But, once a politician always a politician, and she did also have something to say about the summit, and the decision to admit seven new members:
"One of the great moments was when my very good friend, the Slovak Ambassador to the United States, came in and said - we've just been accepted, we've just been accepted - and it made me really focus again on the fact that that's what this is all about. You know, with some of the discussions about who's supporting whom on Iraq and a lot of the longer-term discussions, it's forgotten that what this summit is about is accepting new members."
But Madeleine Albright wasn't just in Prague to observe the summit. On Saturday she was given the Hanno R. Ellenbogen award, established in memory of a philanthropist, who, after growing up in a war-torn Germany, devoted her later life to promoting international understanding. David Vaughan reports on what was rather an unusually award ceremony.
What made the ceremony unusual was that the award was actually a double gift. Madeleine Albright was awarded for her work in promoting international understanding, but she passed on the financial part, worth around 5000 US dollars, to the Czech journalist Petra Prochazkova:
"We are dealing here with and honouring a very very remarkable journalist, someone who does her profession as a journalist with care and perspicacity, and who also has the heart of someone who understands what she is covering."
Petra Prochazkova is the Czech Republic's most accomplished war reporter. She covered the first war in Chechnya in 1994 - at one time as the only foreign journalist left in Grozny - as well as covering conflicts in Ossetia, Georgia, Tajikistan and more recently Afghanistan, drawing attention to truths that many did not want the public to see. It was after seeing the horrors of war-torn Grozny that Petra Prochazkova decided to do more than just report from the city:
"As a journalist I originally though that my job is to tell stories of people I spoke with. Most of them were absolutely normal, unhappy, poor, invisible people, whom nobody listened to. At one moment I recognized that nobody nobody cares. That's why I found it more important to find a way how to help concretely at least three or four families."
What Petra did was to set up a home to help children in Grozny, a home that is up and running to this day, although the Russian authorities no longer allow Petra into the city. The money from the award will go into the running of this home.
