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Home  Publications Sarajevo, 12th September, 1996 Press Conference [Fascists and Democrats]
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Sarajevo, 12th September, 1996 Press Conference [Fascists and Democrats] |
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"Good Morning,
In two days Bosnia Herzegovina goes to the polls—in controversial, complex and historic elections.
We are thus embarked upon a troubled, but hopeful, passage in democracy's direction. It will lead now either toward healing or toward a further fracturing of this war-torn land.
So it is essential that the international community speaks clearly. It behoves us to talk simply.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, there will be no secession. Secession is not an option.,
Secession is not on the cards.
Secession is not on the agenda.
God knows, the international community has made mistakes in the past. But it will not make this one. Secession is not going to happen—whatever loud claims for it are made by ignorant voices.
Still, we hear, day after day, that Serbs and Muslims cannot live together, that Croats and Serbs and Muslims cannot live together, do not want to live together.
Really? We prefer to say that fascists and democrats do not go well together. We prefer to say that democratic Serbs (of whom there are many) and democratic Muslims (of whom there are many) and demo¬cratic Croats (of whom there are many) have always lived together.
The inter entity boundary line is not, and will not become, an international frontier. It is no kind of new frontier.
The only impregnable internal frontier in this country in the future must be one between fascism and democracy, between those who glo¬rify war and those who know what war really is, between extremism and moderation, between hatred and tolerance, between primitives and sophisticates—which is to say, ordinary normal people—between separatists who think of themselves as the chosen people, and those, on the other hand who know that either all of us are "chosen"—or none of us are.
Bosnians need not see their motherland destroyed. Formal partition will not be its fate. This lady is not for turning. Bosnia has paid in blood already, not the cost of division and hatred, but the high price of, and right to, eventual reconciliation and harmony.
Much is missing—the return of refugees, freedom of movement across the IEBL and elsewhere, a desire, for now, of both entities to work together. Indicted war criminals are still at large and wielding unsavoury influence.
And what of bitter war memories that will impede reconciliation? They must be seen, in the future, as memories of that self-same division between fascism and democracy—a struggle in which all liberal and democratic Croats, Muslims and Serbs fought on the same side, and against the common enemies of intolerance, hatred and stupidity.
Thus will the healing process be helped—and historical memory then play, not a negative, but a positive role.
Still, it is difficult to see ahead. We perceive the future now only "through a glass darkly". But as we approach these elections and their aftermath we know that there is no going back.
It is time for each voter to reflect carefully on the last four years—and to ask himself what he really wants for his own, or her own, children.
We also, in the international community, like this citizen/voter, have here come face to face with our own conscience.
That conscience will say, in the name of a merited peace, that secession is not permitted; that politics is the only alternative to war; that moderate politics are the only alternative to hate.
And that the international community will need to stay on in Bosnia until democracy and moderation take full root again, until peace is more than simply the absence of war. Until the longhaul, unglamorous, work of democracy is complete in all parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Until the job is done." |
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Quotes
Reviewing "Aza Beast" in Foreign Affairs (Jan/Feb. 2005), Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann wrote: "This memoir is valuable both as a portrait of a deeply moral man in an awful situation and as an account of the sufferings of the Bosnians ... Murphy's sense of right and wrong, his distaste for "realist" justifications of inaction, and his concern for the victims of war gives this volume its glow and its emotional power"
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