VANITY FAIR NOMINATES PRINCESS ELIZABETH OF YUGOSLAVIA

HALL OF FAME

BECAUSE, having watched her nation—the former Yugoslavia—splinter in the turmoil of war in the Balkans, she worked to bring international aid to a country ravaged by years of Communism and conflict. BECAUSE this member of a once reigning royal family, a descendant of Catherine the Great and second cousin of Britain's Prince Charles, was exiled at age four, witnessed the exile of her father (the late Prince Paul of Yugoslavia), and devoted decades to clearing his name, BECAUSE in 1990 she took the Orthodox bishop of Sava, the Mufti of Belgrade, and the minister of Yugoslav religious affairs to a meeting with the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and Mother Teresa, BECAUSE that year she set up the apolitical, not-for-profit Princess Elizabeth Foundation, which delivered medical supplies and food to refugee camps, BECAUSE in 1998 she flew a surgical team to Belgrade to operate on 18 Serb children with heart defects. BECAUSE she has consistently spoken out against ethnic hatred and helped empower Serb women, exhorting soldiers' mothers to ride in buses to battlefields to stop government attacks during the civil war. BECAUSE she raises funds for the arts in her birthplace, insisting that if she can return to one person "the smile and the belief in life that existed before World War II, that would be an accomplishment." BECAUSE, while thrice married and the mother of actress Catherine Oxenberg, she is refreshingly modest and unmaterialistic, now living in a rented apartment back in Belgrade.

SARAJANE HOARE

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