Bosnia War Quotes

If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement".

And now insane men adrift in a world without order formed a line at the door.  They rendered unto her every evil act brought into this world by God.  They fell upon her with brutality that none of them at any other time would have thought possible.  There was once no scenario that would lead them to behave this way.  At any other time in their life there were no words or arguments that could convince them to treat a woman with such wanton disregard.  No one now asked, “What brought me to this?” Not one of them asked, “Who are these men?  How did we end up here, doing these things? Who am I now?

The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest

I understand your position, Dave.  It’s a big story, and you worked hard to get it.  But if you don’t drop me at the Europa, I’ll blow your head off.  Imagine how big that story would be. There’s no need for these histrionics.  We’ll go to the Holiday Inn.  You can rest, shower, debrief.  You’ll be among friends. Last chance, Dave.  You can be the hero or the headline.  Your call. Let’s talk it out. No.  You talk too much. He started a new line of argument, but before the words passed his lips his brains passed them on the way out. A dirty reddish slime painted the windshield; it covered the dashboard and console. It poured and dripped from the ceiling to the seat.  The driver was covered on one side of his head and body.  The mess made the crowded taxi undrivable. -Also, someone crapped their pants.

The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.

Nothing remains.  The destruction is complete: love, lives, families, friends, cities, homes – all gone now.  All our efforts to be good, to do the right thing, to act well, to be just and generous are now for naught.  Because juxtaposed against any hope for fairness is wickedness, pure and simple.  In some abstract formulation these things may exist in equal measure, which is to say that the scales balance when taking all things into consideration. But that is fantasy, the stuff of religion, hope beyond all reason. Because for those caught in the whirlwind, in the chaos of manifest evil, despair is all there is. Civilization falls away: everything is pointless now.  Survival requires reciprocity. What then if there is none?

I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.

I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.

Grief produces an abundant energy that must find a way to burn itself up. And that is the fundamental problem, one that can take a lifetime to exhaust.

During the war, a battle was fought here, not only for the creation of a new Yugoslavia, but also a battle for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign republic. To some generals and leaders their position on this was not quite clear. I never once doubted my stance on Bosnia. I always said that Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot belong to this or that, only to the people that lived there since the beginning of time.

you see how strangely history repeats itself.Here and now in Bosnia we are seeing images like those of the second world war. I remember that war very well.I was 16 when it began ,and 20 when it ended . Then,too, there were Chentniks and Ustasha,and they are again.the difference is that these Chetniks are worse than the Chetniks of that time,these Ustasha worse than those Ustasha.I can say this with complete confidence ,because Ustasha of that time didn't destroy the Old Bridge ,nor the mosques of Mostar ,and these have done so.

If the international community is not ready to defend the principles which it itself has proclaimed as its foundations, let it say so openly, both to the people of Bosnia and to the people of the world. Let it proclaim a new code of behavior in which force will be the first and the last argument.

You can walk around this culture now, as a proud supporter of the so called anti-war movement and it's made up of a lot of people I used to know … I'd like for them to be asked more often than they are, if your advice had been taken over the last 15 or so years; Slobodan Milosevic would still be the dictator of not just Serbia but also of a cleansed and ruined Bosnia and Kosovo. Saddam Hussein would still be the owner of Kuwait as well as Iraq, he would of nearly have doubled his holding of the worlds oil. The Taliban would still be in charge of Afghanistan. Don't you feel a little reproach to your so called high principle anti-war policy? Would that really have led to less violence, less cruelty?

My mom and dad refused to believe that people who had grown up together in peace and friendship, had gone to the same schools, spoken the same language, and listened to the same music, could overnight be blinded by ethnic hatred and start to brutally kill one another. They simply didn't accept as true that less than two years of a multiparty system and competition for power could poison people's brains so much.

At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…

....in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbors, paramilitaries, soldiers.

A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future.

recent response to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda: while thousands have died almost unbelievably cruel deaths, the entire world has watched CNN and wrung its hands.

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.

(Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)

All the characters in my book are fictional, but every single one of them was inspired by someone I knew and loved who didn't make it out. I wanted to bring them back to life and so, I wrote a book about them.

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States.

After the second world war in 1948 they founded the UN, the United Nations so that a crime like the mass-murder of the Jews could never happen again. Now the UN is a flourishing organization a honourable institution, the only thing is that it doesn't do the thing they founded it for: prevention of mass-murder.

One evening, after he’d read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t it ever stop?’ he said. ‘I can mind Father telling that there’d be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What’s the good in reading, if that’s all there is to read about?

When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator.

The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep. And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

Dünya, Saraybosna'yı -her ne kadar direnişin sembolü olarak hatırlanmasını tercih etsem de- acının sembolü olarak hatırlayacak.

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

War creates murderers and profiteers. Wherever there is conflict you'll find a man ready to torture, rape and kill in the name of The Cause and to line his pocket with a quick easy buck.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.

Bosnia's war had its visual hallmarks. Parks that were turned into cemeteries, refugee families piled onto horse-drawn carts, stop-or-die checkpoints with mines across the road. The most hideous hallmark of all was the blackened patch of ground in the center of town. It always meant the same thing, a destroyed mosque. The goal of ethnic cleansing was not simply to get rid of Muslims; it was to destroy all traces that they had ever lived in Bosnia. The goal was to kill history. If you want to do that, then you must rip out history's heart, which in the case of Bosnia's Muslim community meant the destruction of its mosques. Once that was done, you could reinvent the past in whatever distorted form you wanted, like Frankenstein. p. 85

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.

What came to me then was the voice of my paternal grandmother. She had told me once that every time Bego or Irfan returned to Bosnia to visit, they seemed to her like different people. Unrecognizable. She had blamed this on America... I saw a young man sitting alone in a plastic chair, white-knuckle and wide-eyed and zit-faced, happy and perplexed, and I knew why my grandmother couldn't recognize her own son, why I was wielding a stranger's hand. I knew that someone new would get off this plastic chair and board a plane to Los Angeles and that all the while an 18-year-old Ismet would remain forever in the city under siege, in the midst of a war that would never end. (p.18)

For 1,300 days of Sarajevo's drama, important people in the world who were supposed to act kept their eyes closed, ... But not you. You were not silent. Your voice was clear.

Children lost their arms, legs, and eyes While foreign governments fed us blatant lies Bodies laid on the street, frozen to death While some foreign teenagers took crystal meth

My father was shot in his ankle by a Chetnik And my mother was 2 inches away from death I could have easily become an orphan And suffered endlessly until my last breath

We were trapped, we were completely caged Some of my mother’s good friends were raped This is what went on while war and genocide raged Our dignity, identity, and layers of skin were scraped

I am a lawyer, and for me it is very sad to say that there is now law here. There are weapons rather than law. What did Mao say? Power comes out of the barrel of a gun. It's very true. The situation is decadent. A lot of Serbs think this is leading us nowhere but they feel powerless. How many disagree? I don't know. Perhaps thirty percent disagree, but most of them are frightened and quiet. Perhaps sixty percent agree or are confused enough to go along. They are led by the ten percent who have the guns and who have control of the television towers. That's all they need.' p. 107

More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes. Since the birth of the United Nations, we have seen American forces involved in combat in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam, and more recently with lethal attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereign nations. There were no “boots on the ground” in some of these countries; instead we have used high-altitude bombers or remote-control drones. In these cases we rarely acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and prolonged suffering among people in the combat zones, even after our involvement in the conflict is ended.

In this city, the victors had delusions of grandeur. It was visual. Across the street from the hotel stood City Hall, sporting an oversized Serb flag that hung from the roof to the ground, a hundred feet tall, fifty feet wide, three horizontal stripes of blue, white and red, so large that only a strong breeze could make it flap. The flag, hanging over a building where, fifty years earlier, Kurt Waldheim worked as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, was meant as a projection of Serb nationalism, as though size were all that mattered, rather than content. I had never thought of flags as weapons, but in Bosnia, as in the rest of Europe, they were becoming the deadliest weapons of all. p. 80

For six years, you showed Pero reverence and admiration. So Pero, a sociopath, didn’t want to extinguish the rare flame of respect that illuminated his worthless ego,” Brian explained. “Killing you would have made him feel less powerful, not more.

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. For the first side of this equation, I need no sources. As a conservative, I can confidently attest that whatever else my colleagues might disagree about—Bosnia, John McCain, precisely how many orphans we’re prepared to throw into the snow so the rich can have their tax cuts—we all agree that liberals are stupid. We mean this, of course, in the nicest way. Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe—here is where they go stupid—that most everybody else is nice too. Deep down, that is. Sure, you’ve got your multiple felon and your occasional war criminal, but they’re undoubtedly depraved ’cause they’re deprived. If only we could get social conditions right—eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the ozone, arrest John Ashcroft—everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced, rocking back and forth to “We Shall Overcome.” Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything.

It must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo, or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or respect for real flesh-and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add

The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance

The idea of bearing witness is often very problematic as a concept, as a rhetorical tool, and as a literary device. We no longer need James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia. Everyone is a photographer now, so we are all witnesses. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness. Which means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. What is the function of seeing something, and saying something, if it doesn’t lead to concrete action or change?

This is a world where human races battle endlessly, where people of one faith still slaughter people of another. Religious wars rage from Sri Lanka to Bosnia, from Jerusalem to American cities and towns where Christians still, in the name of Jesus Christ, bring death in his name to their enemies, to their own, even to little children. Tribe, race, clan, family. Deep within us all are the seeds of hate for what is different. We do not have to be taught these things. We have to be taught not to give in to them! They are in our blood, but on our minds is the charity and the love to overcome them.

Peacekeeping is a soldier-intensive business in which the quality of troops matters as much as the quantity. It is not just soldiering under a different color helmet; it differs in kind from anything else soldiers do. The are medals and rewards (mainly, the satisfaction of saving lives), but there are also casualties. And no victories. It is not a risk -free enterprise. In Bosnia, mines, snipers, mountainous terrain, extreme weather conditions, and possible civil disturbances were major threats that had to be dealt with from the outset of the operation. Dag Hammarskjold once remarked, "Peacekeeping is a job not suited to soldiers, but a job only soldiers can do." Humanitarianism conflicts with peacekeeping and still more with peace enforcement. The threat of force, if it is to be effective, will sooner or later involve the use of force. For example, the same UN soldiers in Bosnia under a different command and mandate essentially turned belligerence into compliance over night, demonstrating that a credible threat of force can yield results. Unlike, UNPROFOR, the NATO-led Implementation Force was a military success and helped bring stability to the region and to provide an "environment of hope" in which a nation can be reborn. It is now up to a complex array of international civil agencies to assist in putting in place lasting structures for democratic government and the will of the international community to ensure a lasting peace.

I have always been intrigued by this obsession with so-called black-on-black violence, as if black-on-white violence was somehow more acceptable. And why had no one ever described what happened in Northern Ireland or in Bosnia, Kosovo, et al. with its vicious brutality as examples of white-on-white violence? There it was just violence - then why black-on-black violence?

Many civilians do not think war has touched them until they remember that their grandfather was in World War II, their nephew in Bosnia, or their neighbor’s daughter in Iraq. Or that the suicide in their neighborhood was by a despairing veteran for whom life should have been just beginning. Or that the national debt from the war economy squeezed the hope and finances out of their struggling family’s meager resources. War touches us all. We must awaken to how. Our challenge is this: how do we turn war’s inevitable wounding and suffering into wisdom and growth that truly brings warriors home and benefits us all?

I barely escaped Sarajevo in one piece Chetniks looked directly at my mother They were eager to kill us like mice She saw their evil eyes, as cold as ice They wanted to ensure our extinction They wanted to plan our demise But despite their ammunition We were strategic, clever, and wise Imagine being in a situation like that What would you do? What would you think? How would you deal with the intensity Of being afraid to even blink? Think about people that matter to you most What if they became like a distant ghost? What if all your friends, family, and favorite things Suddenly became birds with clipped wings?

This questioning of pronouns started in the former Yugoslavia, which after terrible wars between 1991 and 2006 was divided into six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. In that environment of war and hypermasculinity, patriotism was made up of a mixture of nationalism, patriarchy, and misogyny. Masculinity was defined by power, violence, and conquest. Women and girls from one’s own group had to be protected—and impregnated to provide children for the nation. Those on the enemy’s side were systematically raped and tortured, both to impregnate the women and humiliate the men.

In fact, neither the grotesque gesticulations of the international forces nor the disgusted lamentations of the representatives of good causes can have any real effect, because we have not taken the decisive step — the final step — in the analysis of the situation. No one dares, or wants, to take that step, which is to recognize, not simply that the Serbs are the aggressors (which is to state the obvious), but that they are our objective allies in a cleansing operation for a future Europe where there are no awkward minorities and for a New World Order where there is no radical opposition to its own values — the values of the democratic dictatorship of human rights and the transparency of markets.

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave. I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls. I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us. As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to bring us the truth.

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.

Over a three-month period in 1995, Holbrooke alternately cajoled and harangued the parties to the conflict. For one month, he all but imprisoned them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio—a stage where he could precisely direct the diplomatic theater. At the negotiations’ opening dinner, he seated Miloševic´ under a B-2 bomber—literally in the shadow of Western might. At a low point in the negotiations, he announced that they were over, and had luggage placed outside the Americans’ doors. Miloševic´ saw the bags and asked Holbrooke to extend the talks. The showmanship worked—the parties, several of them mortal enemies, signed the Dayton Agreement. It was an imperfect document. It ceded almost half of Bosnia to Miloševic´ and the Serbian aggressors, essentially rewarding their atrocities. And some felt leaving Miloševicć in power made the agreement untenable. A few years later, he continued his aggressions in Kosovo and finally provoked NATO airstrikes and his removal from power, to face trial at The Hague. The night before the strikes, Miloševic´ had a final conversation with Holbrooke. “Don’t you have anything more to say to me?” he pleaded. To which Holbrooke replied: “Hasta la vista, baby.” (Being menaced by a tired Schwarzenegger catchphrase was not the greatest indignity Miloševic´ faced that week.) But the agreement succeeded in ending three and a half years of bloody war. In a sense, Holbrooke had been preparing for it since his days witnessing the Paris talks with the Vietnamese fall apart, and he worked hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Crucial to the success of the talks was his broad grant of power from Washington, free of micromanagement and insulated from domestic political whims. And with NATO strikes authorized, military force was at the ready to back up his diplomacy—not the other way around. Those were elements he would grasp at, and fail to put in place, in his next and final mission.

Still, there was a basic contradiction at the heart of Obama’s decision to intervene that contributed to this unraveling. His focus on a front-end solution—consciously trying to avoid the nation-building missteps of George W. Bush—foreclosed any meaningful American role in the postwar stabilization or reconstruction of Libya. There would be no peacekeepers, trainers, or advisers. That distinguished Libya from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from Bosnia, Kosovo, and virtually every other American intervention since World War II. The absence of boots on the ground deprived the United States of leverage in dealing with Libya’s new leaders. While these leaders squabbled among themselves in Tripoli, the radical jihadi groups helped themselves to assault rifles and machine guns from Colonel Qaddafi’s ransacked armories. As in Iraq half a decade earlier, the lack of security proved to be Libya’s undoing: The militias poured in to fill the vacuum left by Qaddafi. What had been hailed by many as a “model intervention” turned out to be a blueprint for chaos.

Until the war had broken out, there had been some sort of order in the strange and complex mixture of the four disparate peoples crowded into the little valley, all calling themselves Bosnians. They celebrated separate holidays, ate different foods, feasted and fasted on different days, yet all depended on one another, but never admitted it. They had lived amidst an ever present, if dormant, mixture of hatred and love for each other. The Muslims with their Ramadan, the Jews with Passover, the Catholics with Christmas, and the Serbs with their Slavas- each of them tacitly tolerated and recognised the customs and existence of others. With suckling pigs turned on spits in Serbian houses, giving off a mouth-watering fragrance, kosher food would be eaten in Jewish homes, and in Muslim households, meals were cooked in suet. There was a certain harmony in all this, even if there was no actual mixing. The aromas had long ago adjusted to one another and had given the city its distinctive flavor. Everything was "as God willed it." But it was necessary to remove only one piece of that carefully balanced mosaic and that whole picture would fall into its component parts which would then, rejoined in an unthinkable manner, create hostile and incompatible entities. ‏Like a hammer, the war had knocked out one piece, disrupting the equilibrium.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

Momilo had once explained to me the mentality of Bosnia’s killers in a few short words: ‘In the morning they hate themselves, in the afternoon the world.’ So, Momilo, where are you now?

The truth was simple but politicians made it complicated.

When there was sunshine followed by calm winds in the summer, the water of these rivers reflected many shiny ripples, and in the sunset, transformed into quiet, silver coloured watercourses.

The peace which Kulin Ban purchased by yielding to Rome was not of long duration, for he could not compel his people to observe its terms. On his death (1216) the Pope appointed a Roman Catholic Ban, and sent a mission to convert the Bosnians. The churches of the country, however, increased the more, and spread into Croatia, Dalmatia, Istria, Carniola and Slavonia. Some six years later the Pope, despairing of converting the Bosnians by other than forcible methods, and encouraged by the success of his crusade in Provence, ordered the King of Hungary to invade Bosnia. The Bosnians deposed their Roman Catholic Ban and elected a Bogomil, Ninoslav. For years the war went on, with varying fortune. Ninoslav yielded to circumstances and became a Roman Catholic, but no change in their rulers affected the faith and confession of the great bulk of the people. The country was devastated, but whenever the invading armies withdrew, the churches were found still existing, and the industry of the people quickly restored prosperity. Fortresses were erected throughout the country “for the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and religion”; the Pope gave the land to Hungary, which long ruled it, but its people still holding to their faith, he at length called a crusade of “all the Christian world” against it; the Inquisition was established (1291), and Dominican and Franciscan brothers competed in applying its terrors to the devoted churches.

Acknowledgements I must acknowledge my debt to so many people and sources. I learnt about the activities of those extraordinarily brave women of the SOE from Marcus Binney’s book: The Women Who Lived for Danger and about what it was like to be a spy from The Spy Wore Red by Aline Countess of Romanones. To find out more about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I read A War of Nerves by Ben Shephard. Phil Kemp from the Yorkshire Air Museum kindly allowed me to clamber around inside the only reconstructed Halifax Bomber in the World. He told me the lipstick story. An ex-soldier who had served in Bosnia gave me more intimate details about suffering from PTSD.

World War I and World War II, we needed to be there, I suppose. But all these little wars in between: Korea, Vietnam, twice in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, even Grenada. Were those places we really needed to be? Old men keep sending young men off to kill or be killed in foreign lands while they spew their platitudes about duty and honor and freedom and loyalty, and all the while the gap between the rich and the poor in our own country continues to widen and jobs get shipped overseas and education continues to falter and it seems to me that all of this killing and being killed comes down to one thing. Greed.

Like the areas in Croatia far from Zagreb, Bosnia was mainly full of nothing: vast expanses of rocky soil, so that even the grass looked like it’d prefer to be rooted somewhere else.

The three-finger salute was flashed by Serbs To signify their hatred and nationalistic pride They shot at us repeatedly until we died We cried over and over again, we couldn’t even hide

I stand by the mothers of Srebrenica I know that Chetniks are a violent herd I think that the entire world should know that Serbs tried to ensure the truth was blurred

I stand by the mothers of Srebrenica I know that Chetniks are a violent herd I think that the entire world should know that Serbs tried to ensure the truth was blurred

The organization of Human Rights Watch spoke the truth About how the Serbian Radical Party launched a campaign Intended to undermine the July 1995 Srebrenica genocide and crime By spinning stories which degraded Bosniaks, Chetniks are such slime

The United Nations lied directly to our face They said that Srebrenica was a safe zone But clearly they did not protect us at all Judging by the number of bodies and bone

Graffiti showed the text of a Dutchbat UN soldier Who said that Bosnian women had no teeth He thought they smelled like shit and had mustaches, too It seemed that evil took over and shared its view

A member of the Red Berets spoke openly About how starving Bosniaks in Srebrenica Was like a cat and mouse game to play It was how nationalism continued to slay Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Karremans and General Ratko Mladić Were seen drinking a toast together to celebrate All of the innocent lives that were destroyed All of the Bosniak heads that were on a plate

Mladen Grujičić became the Mayor of Srebrenica He is an ethnic Serb that spreads vicious poison He said that genocide never happened there Why is there no justice for Bosniaks? This is unfair!

Miloš Milovanović, a former commander of the Serbian Guard Who represents the Serbian Democratic Party in Srebrenica Stated that the entire Srebrenica massacre was a lie He called it propaganda, as if Bosniak people didn’t die

Why were so many painful tears shed? Why were so many babies not fed? Why did Serbs have to throw darts? Why were Bosnian bodies torn into parts?

I’m sick of the oppression, constant trauma, and despair I’m sick of seeing innocent people have to live in fear Being heroic needs to become common, not something rare Otherwise war, genocide, and hate will always be near

Nura Alispahić, the mother of Azmir, had her entire family killed Her husband (Alija) and her two sons (Admir and Azmir) are all gone In addition to her brother, 12 of her nephews, and five brother-in-laws Everyone was wiped out from the face of the Earth, their destiny was drawn In addition to all of the hell that she went through Nura’s daughter died after the Bosnian War because of intense grief Why do Serbs get to do whatever they want to Bosniaks? But then receive prison sentences that are very brief?

Serbs murdered Safet Fejzić, Azmir Alispahić, Sidik Salkić As well as Smajil Ibrahimović, Dino Salihović, and Juso Delić These killers called themselves the Scorpions to display power They thought they were gods, that they ruled society’s tower There is a video online that shows the brutality of this crime How a Serbian Orthodox priest blessed them to show support These Serbs were so confident that Chetniks would win the war They thought that they would never see the inside of a court The cameraman of the Scorpions massacre video was disappointed Because the camera’s battery was almost out Can you imagine the level of evil that lived inside them? This is why good people have to fight against such scum

In another such instance I witnessed a classmate ruthlessly declare to my entire class, “All Bosnians should have been killed in the war”. He was an Albanian Catholic who openly supported Serbs, hatred of Muslims, and genocide. He also enjoyed pointing out that my father was a “weakling” next to his father because my father worked as a security guard (despite having a college degree) while his father worked for a reputable company and made more money despite not having any education. He wanted to emphasize how much more powerful he and his family were than me and my family.

Please remember the heroes of the Bosnian War Like Izet Nanić, Safet Hadžić, and Mehdin Hodžić Who bravely ventured into situations that were unknown Risking their safety in the middle of a war zone Sing this powerful song for everyone to hear Sing so that the stories of Bosnians are clear and loud Pound your fists on the table and declare That justice must be firm, strong, and proud!

For some, their childhood began in World War II And old age ended with the Bosnian War They tried to run from their horrible past They wanted their heartache to pass by fast

Bosnia and Herzegovina went through hell Terror and evil ruthlessly charged through As snipers shot at heads and grenades fell The lives of Bosnians took on a dark view

More examples included Polish Catholics bullying and physically assaulting Bosniaks. Some Polish students slammed tables into the pelvises of Bosniaks to crush them. If a Bosniak child sat down to read a book or eat a meal, Polish students would put their feet on the back of Bosniak children to display their dominance. They would tear, break, and destroy the belongings of Bosniak children (books, backpacks, glasses, jackets, etc). Some of them even pushed Bosniak kids down long flights of stairs.

Furthermore, parents of these bullies also bullied Bosniak children by hitting Bosniaks with their purses (and other personal belongings) as they walked by them. These parents shoved into the shoulders of Bosniak children to make them suffer. Despite such tragic events, Bosnians face Serbian Chetniks and nationalistic Croats who publicly declare that they want to commit another genocide.

Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis, Peaceworks No. 8, United States Institute of Peace, 1996 by Vesna Pesic The sheer complexity of the former Yugoslavia's current crisis has supported numerous interpretations of its origins. One explanation that has acquired a certain currency is "nationalism as a power game," which views the main cause of the Yugoslav crisis as an ideology (in the sense of "false consciousness") of "aggressive nationalism," perpetuated by members of the old nomenklatura who seek to preserve their threatened positions of power in the face of democratic change. … The problem with this approach is that it treats the "national question" as an epiphenomenon of the struggle to preserve power and privilege. In doing so, it forgets that political battles in Yugoslavia have almost always developed around the "national question." Such an understanding of nationalism as "false consciousness" discounts the power of national sentiment among the region's ethnic groups. … By its very nature, Yugoslavia has never had a staatsvolk ("state-people") that could "naturally" dominate by its numbers and serve as the foundation on which a modern nation-state could be built. (As members of the most populous national group, Serbs constituted only 40 percent of the total Yugoslav population.) … An aggressive Serbian nationalism broke the thin thread holding together Yugoslavia's nations in a compromise arrangement, pushing toward an extreme solution of its national question through threats and warmongering: Either Yugoslavia's various nations would accept Serbia's vision of a "normal," unified state that served Serbian interests, or Serbs from all the republics would "join together" and achieve their national unity by force.

The United Nations showed little initial concern—its inadequate and unconcerned Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described Bosnia as ‘a rich man’s war’—

These are the voices of Sarajevo This is the price of nationalism and fear These are the voices of Sarajevo Bosnians lost everything they held dear

We were trapped, we were completely caged Some of my mother’s good friends were raped This is what went on while war and genocide raged Our dignity, identity, and layers of skin were scraped

Countless people were traumatized beyond belief They were just looking for a way to escape From the mountains of intense sorrow and grief So that their suffering would become brief

I stand by the mothers of Srebrenica I know that Chetniks are a violent herd I think that the entire world should know that Serbs tried to ensure the truth was blurred

Serbs murdered Safet Fejzić, Azmir Alispahić, Sidik Salkić As well as Smajil Ibrahimović, Dino Salihović, and Juso Delić These killers called themselves the Scorpions to display power They thought they were gods, that they ruled society’s tower

There is a video online that shows the brutality of this crime How a Serbian Orthodox priest blessed them to show support These Serbs were so confident that Chetniks would win the war They thought that they would never see the inside of a court The cameraman of the Scorpions massacre video was disappointed Because the camera’s battery was almost out Can you imagine the level of evil that lived inside them? This is why good people have to fight against such scum

Serb leaders refuse to admit that genocide Is what happened to Bosniaks in Srebrenica Tomislav Nikolić, Dodik, Šešelj, Dačić, and Vulin are an evil crew That call the genocide in Srebrenica untrue

Serb leaders refuse to admit that genocide Is what happened to Bosniaks in Srebrenica Tomislav Nikolić, Dodik, Šešelj, Dačić, and Vulin are an evil crew That call the genocide in Srebrenica untrue

More than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys Were slaughtered mercilessly by Serbs in Srebrenica Who wanted Bosnia and Herzegovina’s land Who murdered in cold blood, it was all planned Mass graves were found on every single corner Because torture is how Chetniks spend their time They wanted to display their dominance over us And commit acts against humanity, their favorite crime

People were lit on fire, little girls were raped Pregnant women had their stomachs stabbed This is how Chetnik minds were shaped This is how they ensured our mouths were taped

I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs. They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.

I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs. They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.

Serbs frequently used hammers, crowbars, rifles, and kitchen knives to inflict maximum damage on innocent civilians. People had their faces carved out by knives. Even Serb children engaged in beatings and murders of Bosnian citizens.