Bosnian War Quotes

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Ne, nisu jučer ubili majku, srušili kuću. Ubili su, babo, moje djetinjstvo, mladost, snove, sav moj život.”
― Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar, Ljubav je Sihirbaz, Babo

“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.”
― Savo Heleta, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“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”
― Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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!”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“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”
― Aida Mandic, Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina

“The Omarska geological region is rich in iron ore and has been historically lucrative for mining companies. After the Bosnian Genocide, The Mittal Steel Company bought the rights to extract iron ore from the camp site. In 2005, they announced plans to build a memorial replacing one of the camp buildings. Due to active political hostility from Serbs against building a memorial, the idea was abandoned. Bosniaks argue that the bodies of all victims should first be extracted and respectfully cremated before the memorial construction to avoid desecrating dead bodies. 20 years after the Omarska genocidal nightmare, there was no progress for building a memorial.”
― Aida Mandic

“Bosniak civilians were forced to flee their homes due to the constant shelling and army attacks by May 1992. Most of the civilians were taken as prisoners or surrendered to the Serb forces. The residents were then gathered and moved to the prison camps operated by the Serb forces in the surrounding area. Within 3 weeks of the hostile takeover of the government entities, the Serb forces mounted large scale military offense and subsequently started rounding up civilians and moving them to the Omarska camp.”
― Aida Mandic

“The Bosnian Serb forces operated the Omarska concentration camp to torture, murder, rape, and abuse captured Bosnian civilians, intellectuals, and politicians in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina (Prijedor municipality). The camp held over 7,000 innocent Bosnian civilians as prisoners for more than five months during 1992. Several hundred people died due to constant abuse by the Serb forces including mass executions, starvation, beatings, repeated sexual abuse, and horrifying living conditions. The camp guards frequently cut the throats of the Bosniak captives. Prisoners ate spoiled food found by scavenging for it.”
― Aida Mandic

“My mother personally knew Nusreta Sivac, who was held, tortured, and raped at the camp for two months. I admire Nusreta’s extraordinary courage and fortitude in enduring the horror of genocide and speaking boldly about her experiences. She is a champion for women’s rights and a hero of the Bosnian people. She motivated and vehemently advocated for justice by persuading other Bosniak rape victims to come forward and take legal action against their perpetrators.
Thanks to Nusreta’s efforts, rape in the context of war is categorized as a war crime under international law. She was instrumental in helping convict her rapist and bringing him to justice. She was continually raped for two months in captivity. Sivac also spent years collecting evidence and testimonies from rape survivors and constructing legal cases which were presented to the ICTY. For centuries, rape was considered a byproduct of war. Are women just considered spoils of war? Her contributions are a powerful achievement because they mark the first time in history that an international court convicted war crimes solely for sexual violence. I applaud Nusreta for being a pioneer.”
― Aida Mandic

“The Republika Srpska governing bodies of the area rejected the idea of building a memorial. Mirsad Duratović, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Prisoners, Prijedor 1992 and the Regional Union of Detainees of Banja Luka, is actively campaigning for a memorial. Survivors of the camp protested at the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower (Property of The Mittal Steel Company) and called it the “Omarska Memorial in Exile” as the company refused to build the actual memorial.

The tower is tragically connected to the war crimes in Omarska, as the survivors claim that the bones of the victims are mixed with the iron ore being mined at Omarska. Instead of using its considerable power to heal communities that have helped ArcelorMittal succeed, they chose to play political games and support the regressive local nationalism of Republika Srpska. Susan Schuppli (Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths’ College in London) confirms that ArcelorMittal took a political stance that worsened the persecution and injustice in the Omarska region.”
― Aida Mandic

“Amor Mašović, the president of the Bosnian government’s Commission for Tracing Missing Persons, confirms that there are hundreds of undiscovered mass graves. To this day, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is helping identify dead bodies from such mass graves, using technologies such as DNA testing. As many as 150 prisoners were killed every single night in Omarska Camp. Estimates from the United States also suggest that, at a minimum, several hundreds of civilians were murdered during the camp’s evacuation period. Actual numbers are likely to be much higher.

All the toilets in the camp were blocked. There were human feces throughout the area. The prisoners’ extremely deplorable and terrifying conditions were confirmed by a British journalist named Ed Vulliamy in a testimony. He also mentioned that the detainees consumed water from an industrially polluted river causing them severe diarrhea and intestinal diseases. There were zero criminal reports filed against the Serb perpetrators. The victims were constantly subjected to abuse resulting in serious psychological and physical deterioration.”
― Aida Mandic

“During the Bosnian War in 1992, the Serb forces took over the Prijedor municipality. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) repeatedly broadcasted the Serb forces’ capture of Prijedor on radio as a display of significant victory. For further hostile takeover, 400 men were added to the Serb forces in Cirkin Polje (town in Prijedor) to seize Prijedor’s governing bodies such as the municipality, post office, police, bank, courts etc. By April, they successfully captured these government entities.

This forceful takeover by Serb politicians was declared to be an illegal coup d’état by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The coup was a cold blooded, pre-planned strategic effort to capture Prijedor and convert it into a pure Serb municipality. These strategic plans were never concealed. Milomir Stakić played an important role in the strategic capture by the Serb forces.”
― Aida Mandic

“Survivors testified on several occasions that the dead bodies were shot in the head with an “extra” bullet. Many captives were forced to dig graves. This displays the extremely sadistic nature of the crimes of the Serb forces. Within the year, the majority of the Bosnian population of the Prijedor municipality was either murdered or forcefully displaced by the Serb forces, resulting in the Prijedor massacre. The camp buildings were filled over capacity with detainees. Some victims were forced to stay in the area between the two main buildings.

There were land mines set up in the vicinity of the camp. Evidence of more than 145 mass and numerous individual graves was discovered within the surrounding area. Unearthing of a mass grave close to the camp revealed 456 dead bodies. There are certainly many more dead bodies that have not yet been discovered. The number increases exponentially when accounting for the fact that 456 bodies were found in one mass grave. What about the other 144 mass graves? What about the mass graves that were never discovered?”
― Aida Mandic

“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.”
― Vesna Pešić

“The Dark Cloud
Is the amount of time you spent crying because of the evil you saw in people’s hearts
Is the cynicism of people in your past that tried to throw darts
Is the darkness of war criminals that wanted to cut you down the middle
Is the method that you utilized to solve the very wicked riddle”
― Aida Mandic, The Dark Cloud

“The Dark Cloud
Is the loneliness you go through because isolation is common and friends are not
Is the story of 50,000 raped Bosniak women which history forgot
Is the intense pressure of being crushed under a pile of mental weight
Is the backstabbing ex-boyfriend who took you for granted and compelled you to question the integrity of your relationship, including the first date”
― Aida Mandic, The Dark Cloud

“Este mes de noviembre acabará, igual que este año. Algo sigue tirando de nosotros. Nadie sabe cuánto durará todavía este maldito mundo. Utilizando a tres cerdos, les demostraron cómo se degüella a los hombres. Todo estaba previsto. Y ellos obedecían gustosos. Violaban a las mujeres, se las llevaban y las mataban. Una niñita vestida de rojo, de diez años de edad, intentó
ocultarse detrás de su abuela. A todos los mataron a tiros. «Limpiaron» las localidades. No queda más que sangre.
Y cuando los limpien a ellos... Porque el mundo los castigará, todo aquel que lo haya ordenado y todo aquel que lo haya hecho tendrá que morir... Y cuando todos ellos, hasta el último, hayan desaparecido de la faz de la Tierra, quedaremos nosotros, y nosotros lo llevamos todos dentro, cogemos al cerdo por las orejas y tiramos su cabeza hacia atrás.
Tenemos esas orejas y tenemos el cuchillo en las manos y nos degollamos a nosotros, a los otros, a nosotros.”
― Elias Canetti, Il libro contro la morte

“A Mall and Bullet Holes"
While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
a country devastated and drained
by the wars of the global elite,
exactly like mine,
I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side…
On the left side, there was
an old residential building filled with bullet holes
that looked like eyewitnesses
to all the free death that took place here
in a war that has since ended,
yet its real causes and the criminals behind it
are still lurking in every corner,
like infected pus ready to burst
at any moment of awareness…
I wondered bitterly:
When will the world understand
that violence never erupts inadvertently,
that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon
by a small elite that decides in advance
that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality,
must be disciplined with free death for those who resist!
It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that
the minds and souls of all survivors
must permanently be pierced with bullet holes!
In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman
with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes…
I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes,
like those we see in malls…
The elderly woman looked at them as if
wishing to tell them about all that happened here,
but they didn’t notice her existence
for their eyes were fixated on their phones…
I painfully wondered then:
Has anyone told them about what happened here?
Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks?
Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted,
told them about the real price she’d paid
with all the holes left in her heart and her history
for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods?


[Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako