Poets From Serbia

"When all is lost, there is still a memory."

"Oblivion cures the old wounds."

"Fly without wings; dream with open eyes."

"In trying to be perfect, he perfected the art of anonymity."

"If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago, he would've thought they were birds or angels from another world."

"When there is noise and crowds, there is trouble; when everything is silent and perfect, there is just perfection and nothing to fill the air."

"Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer."

"Possible impossibility emerges from an impossible possibility, or possibly, impossible possibility blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility."

"Possible is more a matter of attitude, a matter of decision, to choose among the impossible possibilities, when one sound opportunity becomes a possible solution."

"Those who hate rain hate life."

"Nothing reminds us of an awakening more than rain."

"Pretense cannot sustain blind power."

"Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat."

"Dream by making and make by dreaming."

"Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success we forget the easiness of free beauty lying sad right around the corner, only an instant removed, unnoticed and squandered."

"Since nothing is absolute, there is no absolute silence, only an appearance of temporary peace."

"Since there is no real silence, silence will contain all the sounds, all the words, all the languages, all knowledge, all memory."

"Get out, but don't cause unneeded accidents."

"If unjustified, ambition kills value, eats its own life, kills someone else's desire to fly, cuts their wings, sucks their air."

"There is only as much space, only as much time, only as much desire, only as many words, only as many pages, only as much ink to accept all of us at light-speed hurrying into the Promised Land of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later."

"The most complicated skill is to be simple."

"To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple."

"To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy."

"To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste."

"To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity."

"To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery."

"To keep the air fresh among words is the secret of verbal cleanliness."

"To write good poems is the secret of brevity."

"To go against the grain is the secret of bravery."

"To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry."

"To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism."

"To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool."

"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"From far away, through the sights of a sniper, they would look like Muslims, Serbs or Croats to somebody, but I approached them face to face, I saw them clearly, and trust me... They were just people..."

"While we were growing up, the biggest insult for us was when dark emigrant forces called our homeland an unnatural, artificial creation. When we grew up, the biggest insult for us was when we realised that was true."

"I said: 'I'll come [to Sarajevo]' and they asked me if I'm afraid; headlines where I'm from were saying: 'Balašević to be assassinated in Sarajevo'. [...] Let me tell you whether I'm afraid to come to Sarajevo... If I was afraid of something, I would seek refuge in Sarajevo. I told them: 'Okay, I'm going and it will be the way it is, it's alright'. [They said:] 'Aren't you afraid for your life? Afraid of an assassination?' I said: If that's the price, to be in the cross-hairs of some madman for 2 days. They were in the cross-hairs for 5 years. It's a way for me to, for at least 2 days, be a citizen of Sarajevo. At least in that way."

"Like Machiavelli would say, little Jovana was five months old, and I was prepared to write even "I saw Feldmarshall Göring three times", just to slip away from the barracks for two days and see my little girl and her beautiful mother."

""I have always been against the war; I placed my family's existence in danger because I was speaking out against primitivism and nationalism and stupidity. I didn't do that so I could perform in Croatia again one day, but so I could talk with my children as a man, when the time comes." \"