Yugoslav Wars

"When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned -- that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option; that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other peoples minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless. I was so hopeful. Paradoxically, I was so hopeful then. Many of us were, although we had the right to give up on humanity, to give up on culture, to give up on education, to give up on the possibility of living ones life with dignity in a world that has no place for dignity. We rejected that possibility. And we said, "No, we must continue believing in a future, because the world has learned." But again, the world hasnt. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia. Will the world ever learn?"

"We must tell our children. But more than that, we must teach them. Because remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing. In this sense, "never again" is a challenge to us all -- to pause and to look within. For the Holocaust may have reached its barbaric climax at Treblinka and Auschwitz and Belzec, but it started in the hearts of ordinary men and women. And we have seen it again -- madness that can sweep through peoples, sweep through nations, embed itself. The killings in Cambodia, the killings in Rwanda, the killings in Bosnia, the killings in Darfur -- they shock our conscience, but they are the awful extreme of a spectrum of ignorance and intolerance that we see every day; the bigotry that says another person is less than my equal, less than human. These are the seeds of hate that we cannot let take root in our heart."

"Again, the [9/11] hijackers were described as deviants who had lost their way and did not represent either their society or the true Islam. But the Saudi hijackers were not outcasts, they weren’t even living on the far margins, not even the way Mansour had done. They had gone to school and learned the Quran, grown up in mostly middle-class, deeply religious families, and gone to university to study law. Some were school dropouts; only one of them had mental difficulties, for which he found solace at the mosque. They were imams in neighborhood mosques, or hafiz, men who had learned the entire Quran by heart. Most of them had gone briefly to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya in 1999 or 2000, although few had made it to an actual battlefield. Bosnia and Chechnya were wars deemed righteous by Saudi officialdom, a fight in the name of Islam, a battle to protect Muslims from slaughter. Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh and future king, had fund-raised for Bosnia just as he had done for Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s, dismayed by Western inaction in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia reportedly channeled $300 million worth of weapons to the Muslim-led government of Bosnia, on top of $500 million in humanitarian aid."

"Common wisdom today has it that Yugoslavia was a doomed experiment. In the 1990s, ill-informed Western journalists reporting on the Yugoslav implosion wars wrote of the “centuries-old conflict between Serbs and Croats" — when the real genesis of Serb-Croat hostility really only reached back to the rise of nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries."

"In Bosnia-Herzegovina the world watched daily over television the horrors perpetuated by the Serbs against the Muslim Bosniacs. In one case a British officer was very upset and furious as he condemned the burning of a house where women and young children were still alive inside. Thousands were murdered by the Serbs in Srebrenica even as the European forces who were supposed to be protecting them retreated and looked the other way. But for a very long time the Western European nations and America refused to act against the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. They feared that the Russians might come to the defence of the Serbs. Elsewhere they were not afraid of the Russians. They freely bomb Iraq, an ally of Russia. But in former Yugoslavia they feared Russia`s reaction. And so they allowed Serbian atrocities to go on. More than 200,000 Bosniacs, mostly the young people, were massacred and thrown into hastily dug graves. Many people cynically commented that had Bosnia-Herzegovina been producing oil for the West, or if the Serbs were Muslims, swift action would have been seen."

"On the shelves of the globalized market, the Powers are offering humanity only different versions of the same wrap: they come in all colors, flavors, sizes and shapes. They are for all tastes and all pocket books. There is only one thing that makes them the same, the results. Always destruction, always anguish, always death. And death, anguish, and destruction are always for the other, for the different, for that which is unnecessary, for that which is in the way, for that which is below."

"The notion of civility does not submit easily to definition. To pardon a phrase, its sort of a "we know it when we see it" phenomenon. Most of us know when we are treated rudely, disrespectfully, or improperly. We also know in our hearts when we treat others uncivilly. Perhaps with all the problems in the world today, this might not seem very important. In this country, crime and poverty still plague us. In Bosnia, we see the attempted extermination of an entire people. Yet, notions of fair play, civility, and respect for the inherent worth of another persons ideas, are all values that have been vital to the continued success of this country, and essential tools which our leaders must bring to any domestic or international crisis."

"We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference."

"The barbarous violence was brought to an end in 1995 by an agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio; and Milošević was momentarily hailed around the world as a peacemaker. But he had suspended action in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina only because he currently lacked the necessary military power. Kosovo, morever, was another matter and in 1998 he carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing which forced Albanians to flee for their lives over the border into Albania. President Clinton convinced the UN to sanction armed intervention. In March 1999, after Milošević refused to give way, Belgrade suffered relentless NATO bombing from the air. By June he had no alternative but to pull out of Kosovo. Political demonstrations began against him in Belgrade. In the following year he went down to defeat in Serbia’s elections and was ousted from office. In 2001 the Serbian authorities surrendered him for trial as a war criminal at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague; he died in March 2006 before any verdict was reached. Yugoslavia had long since been dismembered and its communism consigned to the dustbin of history. Nationalism, casting off the light disguise of constitutional federalism, had triumphed – and only to a partial degree did it lead to liberal democracy. The system of political patronage and financial corruption outlived the communist order in the states carved out of Yugoslavia."

"We stood with those taking risks for peace: in Northern Ireland, where Catholic and Protestant children now tell their parents violence must never return; in the Middle East, where Arabs and Jews who once seemed destined to fight forever now share knowledge and resources and even dreams. And we stood up for peace in Bosnia. Remember the skeletal prisoners, the mass graves, the campaign to rape and torture, the endless lines of refugees, the threat of a spreading war. All these threats, all these horrors have now begun to give way to the promise of peace. Now our troops and a strong NATO, together with our new partners from central Europe and elsewhere, are helping that peace to take hold. As all of you know, I was just there with a bipartisan congressional group, and I was so proud not only of what our troops were doing but of the pride they evidenced in what they were doing. They knew what Americas mission in this world is, and they were proud to be carrying it out."

"In his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson warned of entangling alliances. But in our times, America cannot and must not disentangle itself from the world. If we want the world to embody our shared values, then we must assume a shared responsibility. If the wars of the 20th century, especially the recent ones in Kosovo and Bosnia, have taught us anything, it is that we achieve our aims by defending our values and leading the forces of freedom and peace. We must embrace boldly and resolutely that duty to lead—to stand with our allies in word and deed and to put a human face on the global economy, so that expanded trade benefits all peoples in all nations, lifting lives and hopes all across the world."

"What are the problems of the present-day world order? Let us be frank about it, we are all experts here. We talk and talk, we are like diplomats. What happened in the world? There used to be a bipolar system. The Soviet Union collapsed, the power called the Soviet Union ceased to exist. All the rules governing international relations after World War II were designed for a bipolar world. True, the Soviet Union was referred to as "the Upper Volta with missiles." Maybe so, and there were loads of missiles. Besides, we had such brilliant politicians like Nikita Khrushchev, who hammered the desk with his shoe at the UN. And the whole world, primarily the United States, and NATO thought: this Nikita is best left alone, he might just go and fire a missile, they have lots of them, we should better show some respect for them. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, what is the situation and what are the temptations? There is no need to take into account Russias views, it is very dependent, it has gone through transformation during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we can do whatever we like, disregarding all rules and regulations. This is exactly what is happening. Dominique here mentioned Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia before that. Was this really all handled within the framework of international law? Do not tell us those fairy-tales."