Bosnian Quotes

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.

Jer, i najveće pustinje imaju svoje proleće, pa ma kako kratko i neprimetno bilo.

Zaborav sve leči, a pesma je najlepši način zaborava, jer u pesmi se čovek seća samo onoga što voli.

كان العثمانيون يقولون: ثلاثة لا يمكن أن تبقى خافية (الحب، والسعال، والفقر).

Let that man be a Bosnian, Herzegovinian. Outside they don't call you by another name, except simply a Bosnian. Whether that be a Muslim (Bosniak), Serb or Croat. Everyone can be what they feel that they are, and no one has a right to force a nationality upon them.

For a man filled with a great, true and unselfish love, even if it be on one side only, there open horizons and possibilities and paths which are closed and unknown to so many clever, ambitious, and selfish men.

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

A sećanja, kad se jednom krenu, ne zadržavaju se kod početka.

They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'.

Ne, nisu jučer ubili majku, srušili kuću. Ubili su, babo, moje djetinjstvo, mladost, snove, sav moj život.

For only thus, living each moment separately and looking neither forward nor back, could such a life be borne and a man keep himself alive in hope of better days.

They looked at the paper and saw nothing in those curving lines, but they knew and understood everything, for their geography was in their blood and they felt biologically their picture of the world.

Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.

إن الشعب لا يتذكر ولا يروي إلا مايستطيع أن يفهمه وأن يحيله إلى أسطورة.

Tako se na kapiji, između neba, reke i brda, naraštaj za naraštajem učio da ne žali preko mere ono što mutna voda odnese. Tu je u njih ulazila nesvesna filozofija kasabe: da je život neshvatljivo čudo, jer se neprestano troši i osipa, a ipak traje i stoji čvrsto "kao na Drini ćuprija".

A što svijet hvali dobre i izdašne ljude, to je zato što od njih i njihove propasti živi.

Lepota je skupa, ludo skupa a ništavna i varljiva stvar.

العظماء يموتون مرتين : مرة حين يبارحون هذه الأرض، وأخرى حين يزول ما شادوه من بناء.

Whenever a government feels the need of promising peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite.

ليس هذا أوان الموت ،، بل أوان برهان المرء على قيمته.

Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades. Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.

Who lies for you will lie against you.

I feel absolutely no loyalty to Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian national causes. I have no other emotion but utter contempt for people who helped destroy Yugoslavia, and I feel the same about the people who are now selling what is left of it." (p. 13)

...every woman has some reason to weep and weeping is sweetest when it is for another's sorrow.

Hope is an act of desperate defiance against monstrous odds.

WHITE AMERICANS HAVE A VERY UNUSUAL SENSE OF HISTORY. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansed in the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.

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.

Život je neshvatljivo čudo, jer se neprestano troši i osipa, a ipak traje i stoji čvrtso- kao na Drini ćuprija.

Buđenje u zoru! Oduvek je bila navikla da u to vreme rešava sva pitanja za koja ni dan ni noć nisu mogli da nađu rešenja.

... u krvi im je saznanje da se pravi život sastoji od samih zatišja i da bi ludo i uzaludno bilo mutiti ta retka zatišja, tražeći neki drugi, čvršći i stalniji život koga nema.

But misfortunes do not last forever (this they have in common with joys) but pass away or are at least diminished and become lost in oblivion. Life on the kapia always renews itself despite everything and the bridge does not change with the years or with the centuries or with the most painful turns in human affairs. All these pass over it, even as the unquiet waters pass beneath its smooth and perfect arches.

One detail that’s impossible to miss? Just like in the train station, every person with a gun is white, and not white like maybe they’re Bosnian—the kind of white that thinks internment camps are going to make America great again.

Jer jedino tako, živeći svaki trenutak odvojeno i ne gledajući ni napred ni natrag, može se ovakav život podneti i živ čovek sačuvati za bolje dane.

Ko obrazom plaća ono što steče, taj je rđav trgovac.

...it was an intimate bond between the men of that generation ... for nothing brings men close together than a common misfortune happily overcome.

Nije važno koliko čovek vremena uštedi, nego šta s tim ušteđenim vremenom radi; ako ga na zlo upotrebi, onda bi bolje bilo da ga nema. Nije glavno pitanje da li čovek brzo ide, nego kud ide i po kakvom poslu.

Šta vredi sva ta huka, kad evo dođe ovakvo vreme pa čovek propadne tako da ne može ni da izgine ni da živi, nego trune kao direk u zemlji i svačiji je, samo nije svoj.

Jer, lakse je podneti i najneprijatniji pogled nego oci koje uporno gledaju pored vas.

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

Never can that be told, for those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift of words and those who are dead can tell no tales. Those were things which are not told, but forgotten. Fore where they not forgotten, how could they ever be repeated?

Meanwhile the subject peoples of the Austrian Empire were starting to think they might rule themselves—which was why the Bosnian nationalist Gavrilo Princip had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Rekao je da nije niko i ništa; putnik na zemlji, prolaznik u ovom prolaznom vremenu, senka na suncu...

I don't know. I only think the Austrians will not stop when they have won a victory. It is in defeat that we become Christian." "The Austrians are Christians-- except for the Bosnians." "I don't mean technically Christian. I mean like Our Lord." He said nothing. "We are all gentler now because we are beaten. How would our Lord have been f Peter had rescued him in the Garden?

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.

A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: “We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much.”33

Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves. So, in the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills, generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'.

Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

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.

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.

Sva od stvarnosti, a sama nestvarna, koja nije ni ono što je bilo juče ni ono što će biti sutra; nešto kao prolazno ostrvo u poplavi vremena.

Great men die twice, once when they leave this world and a second time when their life work disappears.

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

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.

Ali nocu, tek nocu, kad ozive i planu nebesa, otvara se, beskrajnost i silna snaga toga sveta u kom se ziv covek gubi i ne moze da se priseti ni sama sebe ni kuda je posao ni sta hoce ni sta treba da radi. Tu se samo zivi, istinski, vedro i dugo; tu nema reci koje tesko obavezuju za ceo zivot, ni smrtonosnih obecanja ni bezizlaznih polozaja, sa kratkim rokom koji neumoljivo tece i istice, a sa smrcu ili sramotom kao jedinim izlazom na kraju. Da, tu nije kao u dnevnom zivotu, gde ono sto je jednom receno ostaje neporecivo, a obecano neizbezno. Tu je sve slobodno, beskrajno, bezimeno i nemo.

Europe has another meaning for me. Every time I mention that word, I see the Bosnian family in front of me, living far away from whatever they call home and eating their own wonderful food because that's all that is left for them. The fact remains that after fifty years, it was possible to have another war in Europe; that it was possible to change borders; that genocide is still possible even today.

Svak želi više, traži bolje ili strepi od goreg.

Teško je ploviti bez krivudanja sa tolikim svetom na brodu i za spas svih treba ponekad nešto od tereta i u more baciti.

Teško je zamisliti varoš sa manje novca i slabijim izvorima zarade a sa većom žeđi za novcem, sa manje volje za radom i veštine da se privredi, a sa više želja i prohteva.

Ne treba mene žaliti. Jer svi mi umiremo samo jednom, a veliki ljudi po dva puta; jednom kad ih nestane sa zemlje, a drugi put kad propadne njihova zadužbina.

Nothing brings men closer than a common misfortune happily overcome.

I have two minds about everything. Side A(merican) and side B(osnian). I wish I could find a way to drop off the face of the planet and leave my minds behind, get a new one. I dream of disappearing, cutting all ties, becoming a derelict, free to rave. I'd be calmer, happier. Or better, going back to Bosnia and telling no one, not even you. Just live there in the same city, grow a beard, and watch you to go to the market from the café across the street through a pair of sunglasses, never letting you know who I am. (p.43)

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.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been—and will be—repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or explusion or death. The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written “so that it will not happen again,” as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why—and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

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.

They were all there.And all of them,these days,were as if drunk with bitterness,from desire for vengeance and longed to punish and to kill whomsoever they could,since they could not punish or kill those whom they wished.

...while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House - Luda kuća. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serbs' military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžić performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.

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.

But one thing could not happen; it could not be that great and wise men of exalted soul who would raise lasting buildings for the love of God, so that the world should be more beautiful and man live in it better and more easily, should everywhere and for all time vanish from this earth. Should they too vanish, it would mean that the love of God was extinguished and had disappeared from the world. That could not be.

The desire for sudden change and the thought of their realization by force often appears among men like a disease and gains ground mainly in young brains; only these brains do not think as they should, do not amount to anything in the end and the heads that think thus do not remain long on their shoulders. For it is not human desires that dispose and administer the things of this world. Desire is like a wind, it sifts the dust from one place to another, sometimes darkens the whole horizon, but in the end calms down and leaves the old and eternal picture of the world. Lasting deeds are realized on this earth only by God’s will, and man is only His humble and blind tool.

Tko ne vidi sada, taj neće nikad vidjeti.

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.

Bana hiç acımayın… Biz, sıradan insanlar, yalnız bir sefer ölürüz. Ama büyük adamlar iki sefer ölürler. Birinci sefer bu dünyayı bırakıp göçtükleri, ikinci sefer de bıraktıkları eserler, yıkılıp kaybolduğu zaman.

Incompatible religious doctrines have Balkanised our world and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

A most je i dalje stajao, onakav kakav je oduvek bio, sa svojom večitom mladošću savršene zamisli i dobrih i velikih ljudskih dela koja ne znaju šta je starenje ni promena i koja, bar tako izgleda, ne dele sudbinu prolaznih stvari ovoga sveta.

Но есть на свете вещи, по самой своей сути не созданные оставаться в тайне, – ни самые крепкие замки, ни глухие барьеры не могут спрятать их от людских глаз и ушей. («Три вещи в мире невозможно скрыть, – говорили турки, – любовь, кашель и бедность».)

Grievances are not in themselves sufficient to radicalize somebody. They are half the truth. My meaning is best summarized this way: when we in the West failed to intervene in the Bosnian genocide, some Muslims became radicalized; when we did intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq, more Muslims became radicalized; when we failed to intervene in Syria, many more Muslims became radicalized. The grievance narrative that pins the blame on foreign policy is only half the story. It is insufficient as an explanation for radicalization.

Ono što bi se za njih naročito moglo kazati, to je: da nije bilo odavno pokolenja koje je više i smelije maštalo i govorilo o životu, uživanju i slobodi, a koje je manje imalo od života, gore stradalo, teže robovalo i više ginulo nego što će stradati, robovati i ginuti ovo.

Ethnic’ in this context is yet another euphemism. What we are seeing in Iraq is religious cleansing. The original usage of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia is also arguably a euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians.6 I

The streets were empty, the courtyards and gardens as if dead. In the Turkish houses depression and confusion reigned, in the Christian houses caution and distrust. But everywhere and for everyone there was fear. The entering Austrians feared an ambush. The Turks feared the Austrians. The Serbs feared both Austrians and Turks. The Jews feared everything and everyone since, especially in times of war, everyone was stronger than they.

Is it not the same, Bosnian and Arabic?” asked ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​. That is just one example of how little Americans know about Arabs and Islam. ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ is a member of ■​■​■​■​■​ and not just anybody; ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ is supposedly armed with basic knowledge about Arabs and Islam. But ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ and the other interrogators always addressed me, “You guys from the middle east…,” which is so completely wrong. For many Americans, the world comprises three places: The U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world, the Middle East. Unfortunately, the world, geographically speaking,

Sve mu daj, a uzmi mu zdravlje, pa kao da mu ništa dao nisi.

genocide n. 1. ethnic cleansing When Serbian gunmen go door-to-door in a Bosnian town pulling Slavs and Roman Catholic Croats from their homes at gunpoint and herding them forcibly onto cattle trucks and deporting or later shooting them, the Serbs call it "ethnic cleansing." - New York Times, May 22, 1992 2. depopulation 3. elimination of unreliable elements

Lost in his thoughts he looked out from his shop at the shining loveliness of that first day of March. Opposite him, a little to the side, stood the eternal bridge, everlastingly the same; through its white arches could be seen the green, sparkling, tumultuous waters of the Drina, so that they seemed like some strange diadem in two colours which sparkled in the sun.

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

Dovoljan je sam sebi i potpuno zadovoljan onim što je i što znači u očima drugih ljudi. Sam nema potrebe da bude ili da izgleda ma šta drugo do ono što jeste, a niko od njega ne očekuje i ne traži ništa drugo.

كما يقع كثيراً في تاريخ الإنسانية، أصبحت أعمال العنف والنهب وحتي القتل من الأمور التي يسكت عنها وتباح، شريطة أن ترتكب باسم مصالح عليا، وتحت ستار شعارات معينة ، وأن تنزل على عدد صغير ممن يسمون أسماء خاصة وينتمون إلي عقيدة معينة

Bir Hıristiyana mezarlıkta bir kabri nasıl çok görebilirsin? dedi. Hem de onun günahlarını affetmeyecekmişim? Hayatında mutsuz oluşu yetmiyor mu ki?.. Yukarda, hepimizin günahlarının hesabını soracak olan, varsın onun da günahlarının hesabını sorsun!..

All at once, in his dangerous position, Ćorkan felt himself separated from his companions. He was now like some gigantic monster above them. His first steps were slow and hesitating. His heavy clogs kept slipping on the stones covered with ice. It seemed to him that his legs were failing him, that the depths below attracted him irresistibly, that he must slip and fall, that he was already falling. But his unusual position and the nearness of great danger gave him strength and hitherto unknown powers. [...] Instead of walking, he began to dance, he himself did not know how, as free as if he had been on a wide green field and not on that narrow and icy edge. All of a sudden he felt himself light and skilful as a man sometimes in dreams. His heavy and exhausted body felt without weight. The drunken Ćorkan danced and floated above the depths as if on wings. [...] His dance bore him onward where his walk would never have borne him- No longer thinking of the danger of the possibility of a fall, he leapt from one leg to the other and sang with outstretched arms as accompanying himself on a drum.

Vreme muči i zamara samo one koji žive zauzeti jedino ništavnim brigama o svojoj ličnosti i svojim uživanjima, ali ono je kratko i neosetno onima koji, zaboravljajući sebe, rade na ma kakvom poslu koji ih prevazilazi; mereno veličinom jednog smelog i neostvarljivog sna, ono gotovo i ne postoji.

No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the brink, between two worlds....to love and hate both, to hesitate and waver all one's life. To have two homelands and yet have none. To be everywhere at home and to remain forever a stranger. In short, to be torn on a rack, but as both victim and torturer at once.

Svaka istinska, velika strast traži samoću i bezimenost. Čovek koji služi svojoj strasti želi da ostane neviđen i neznan, nasamo sa predmetom svoje strasti, i o svemu drugom voli i ume više i bolje da govori nego o tome što je glavni predmet njegovih misli i želja. Čak i porok ima svoj stid i svoje obzire, iako naopake i neobične.

De fapt, opreliştile, ordinea şi disciplina legală erau mai straşnice decât înainte de vreme; păcatele se pedepseau, iar plăcerile se plăteau mai scump şi mai anevoie decât înainte; doar că legile şi mijloacele erau altele şi lăsau oamenilor şi în privinţa asta, ca în toate celelalte, iluzia că, dintr-odată, viaţa devenise mai largă, mai luxoasă şi mai liberă.

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.

Narod pamti i prepričava ono što može da shvati i što uspe da pretvori u legendu. Sve ostalo prolazi mimo njega bez dubljeg traga, sa nemom ravnodušnošću bezimenih prirodnih pojava, ne dira njegovu maštu i ne ostaje u njegovom sećanju. Ovo mučno i dugo zidanje bilo je za njega tuđi rad o tuđem trošku. Tek kad je kao plod toga napora iskrsnuo veliki most, ljudi su počeli da se sećaju pojedinosti i da postanak stvarnog, vešto zidanog i trajnog mosta kite maštarskim pričama koje su opet oni umeli vešto da grade i dugo da pamte.

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?

Ovakvi nasrtljivi i zloćudi manijaci redovno su drski i uporni ljudi. (A drskost i uporstvo su brat i sestra.) I kad vam nanesu neku štetu ili sramotu, oni redovno uspevaju da ubede najpre sebe a zatim i većinu sveta da ste vi sami odgovorni za svoju nezgodu. Tako vi imate dve štete, a njihova sujeta dva uspeha. Jedan, kad su vas nagovorili na pogrešan korak. Drugi, kad su uspeli da odgovornost za to skinu sa sebe i prebace na vas. Zato se drski i uporni ljudi nikad ne mogu popraviti u svojim manama i slabostima, jer oni, ne osetivši nikad rđave posledice svojih mana na sebi, i ne primećuju da ih imaju. I stoga treba od takvih ljudi bežati što dalje, pa ma kako dobra i na izgled privlačna bila svojstva koja oni inače imaju.

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

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.