Yugoslavia Quotes

“I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”

“Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it.”

“For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.”

“Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?''Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.''Hungarian?''Hungarian.''What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on?'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.''And where do you Hungarians live?''In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'.'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.”

“For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous imp”

“The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an 'international coalition' in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain's military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was...”

“In our tribunal, we look only at personal criminal responsibility in a very tightly defined, narrow way and we demand proof beyond a resonable doubt about the involvement of the individual. We do no have a mandate to establish the moral responsibility of those who saw things happen and did nothing, including people who might have had the capacity to stop the process and did nothing. But we have to be careful in thinking that just because we focus on individual criminal guilt we therefore absolve the community. The old distinctions are too simplistic when we move up the chain of command and witness the merging of the collectivity into the personae of these charismatic political and military leaders.'-Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”

“Examples of goodness that know no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documents of war, as they also represent an axis around which a healthy future can be constructed after the atrocities have halted.”

“To retain our dignity, we must sometimes refuse to live life at any cost”

“The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.”