Bosnian Serbs

"Personally, for this reason, I feel great professional satisfaction and I think we can all be satisfied. Our generation certainly needs to be satisfied. If the next generation are young, this youth is accepted as their own, as something in common, it will be a great reason to be personally very happy."

"Not everyone in this country is a thief or corrupt. If I was, I would be a politician and be doing far better in life."

"My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. Okay, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks."

"The people of Bosnia -- meaning Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs -- could each say they're speaking their own, individual language. They say that it's their national language, and that it's not for Europe, Belgrade, or Zagreb to decide differently... The same is true for Montenegrins. If they think Montenegrin is a distinct language, then basically it is. If on the other hand they decide to share a language with Serbs or Croats, that would work just as well. But the tendency here is to see each of these languages as special and distinct."

"The fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the man who pulled the trigger on 28 June – certainly that was the view of the Yugoslav authorities, who marked the spot where he did so with bronze footprints and a plaque celebrating the assassin’s ‘first steps into Yugoslav freedom’. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was an intuitive sympathy with South Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Hapsburg Empire. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, It has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as an historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically – or at least less contemptuously – than we used to on the vanished imperial patchwork of Austria-Hungary."

"On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives."

"There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom."

"Our shades shall tread Vienna's streets, roaming the courtyard, striking fear in noble hearts."

"People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that.... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide."

"This, what you are doing, is not good. This is the path that you want to take Bosnia and Herzegovina on, the same highway of hell and death that Slovenia and Croatia went on. Don't think that you won't take Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell, and the Muslim people maybe into extinction. Because the Muslim people cannot defend themselves if there is war here."

"There is no doubt that the United States and Germany had their own interests in igniting wars in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia."

"Who are they for a whole nation to suffer for them, both in the Republika Srpska and in Serbia, because a certain Mladic has decided that he does not want to surrender and go to court? Or Karadzic? And then they say: "I love the Serbian people." The hell they love us. They are pushing us into ever deeper problems."

"In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detention camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (...) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (...) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (...) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation."

"Setting his goal as the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’, Milošević deployed the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) — then the fourth largest army in Europe — against would-be secessionist republics. Meanwhile, Serb separatist forces within such republics were encouraged to rise up. Lacking a large Serb population, Slovenia was allowed by Milosevic, after a ‘ten-day war’, to go its own way after declaring independence in June 1991. Not so with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: he was determined that their sizeable Serb minority populations would remain within Yugoslavia. Milosevic loyalists helped carve out Serb autonomous enclaves in each: first Milan Babic in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, and then General Ratko Mladić and the psychiatrist-turned-demagogue Radovan Karadžić, within Bosnia. Paramilitary gangs bearing outlandish names — Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles, the Chetniks — rampaged through Serb-run Croatia and Bosnia, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. In the process they endowed the lexicon of conflict with a new term, ethnicko cis cenje terena — literally the ‘ethnic cleansing of the earth’, or simply ethnic cleansing."

"In addition to the ICC, various other bodies have been involved in the hunt for and prosecution of war criminals. The best-known of these is the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in 1993 to bring to justice those responsible for crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. In 1996 a Bosnian Serb, Dusan Tadic, became the first man to be convicted by the tribunal when he was found guilty of murder and torture. Other prosecutions have followed, most notably that of Slobodan Milošević — the first ever sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes (see main text). Having evaded capture for more than a decade — despite an international warrant for his arrest — Milošević's Bosnian Serb proxy Radovan Karadžić was finally run to earth in July 2008 in Belgrade, where he had been working under a new identity as a New Age healer. Ratko Mladić, who with Karadžić was responsible for events on the ground in Bosnia, remains at large at the time of this writing. The fate of Milošević stands as a clear message to them and others like them: for the perpetrators of the most terrible crimes, there is no escape from justice."

"That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible."

"If I was English I would be very much against Putin. If I was American I would even fight with him, but if I was Russian I would vote for him."

"There are always motherfuckers queuing up to pull you down to earth. But we must fly occasionally, we all have to feel that joy or we are nothing."

"My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. Okay, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks."

"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that a western pile of shit is actually pie."

"I just don't get it. The pigeon was already dead, we found it in the road. And no other censor has objected. What is the problem with you, English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work."