Цитаты — стр. 2

But what exactly happened in his mind before that, before Jelisić raised his arm and fired the bullet that decided not only the future of the prisoner in the photo but his own as well? For after that shot, there was no way back for Jelisić. On that day in May, he started out on a road that six years later brought him to the tribunal in The Hague.

We grew up with many such images, gathered from movies, literature, and family stories. On the one hand we had memory, but on the other hand we had our history textbooks, which shaped history to suit the Communist Party ideology. It was not that we were sheltered from the past; on the contrary, we may have had too much of it. But our history books were filled not with facts but with legends: with Tito’s army offensives, his great battles, and his even greater victories. Decades later, when I learned about the big massacre that had taken place in the spring of 1945 near Bleiburg in Austria, where tens of thousands of soldiers of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, in retreat and considering surrendering to the Allies, were killed mercilessly by Tito’s antifascist army, it was too late to recondition me. I already had a very clear idea that Partisans were antifascist heroes, unlike the Chetniks, Germans, and Ustashe. At that point, no historic facts that I learned about with astonishment later on could erase the pictures embedded in my early childhood memory about who were the good guys and who were the bad ones.

One can hardly defend oneself against such propaganda if there is no common history that everybody can believe in. Under the pressure of emotions, a thin layer of rationality easily falls away. The history that we learned—which was not in fact history—made it easier for us to abandon reason in favor of pure emotions.

For my generation, living in a Communist country, jeans were a product of the Western bourgeois society and a sign of decadence; my father would never have allowed me to wear them. But communism meant little to my daughter’s generation, and Tito even less. They were young children when he died in 1980 and hardly remembered him at all. They were not marked by the cult of Tito as much as we were.

More likely, the war itself turned ordinary men—a driver, a waiter, and a salesman, the three accused were—into criminals because of opportunism, fear, and, not least, belief. Hundreds of thousands had to have believed that they were right in what they were doing. Otherwise, such large numbers of rapes and murders simply cannot be explained—and this is even scarier.

Перший обруч - це напевно... пояс невинності на дівчатах.
Другий - це напевно... такий танець, коли всі танцюють у колі. Ну там стелять хусточку на підлогу й усі з усіма цілуються.
А третій обруч - це обійми мого далекого минулого...
Четвертий обруч – це обійми теплого вітру, кружіння енергій...
Вона була захищена п'ятим обручем весни - своєю зеленою недоторканістю.
Шостий обруч - це залізне кільце двобою велетнів.
Сьомий обруч - це коли з кимось раніше не знайома почуваєшся легко і вільно, ніби сто років знаєшся.
Восьмий обруч - це коли стискається серце.
Дев'ятий обруч - це коли залишаєшся сам на сам і від цього нікуди не подітись.
Десятий обруч - це полон, з якого неможливо повернутися, нічого не втративши.
Одинадцятий обруч - це коли двоє стають одним.
Дванадцятий обруч - це коло вічності, початок і кінець в одному. Альфа і Омега, всі ми і кожне з нас...

He was a good and loyal friend. In the late eighties he did not take Serbian nationalism seriously. He did not pay much attention to the idea that Serbs should all live in one state, and, anyway, politics was for politicians. It had nothing to do with his life, with his friends and fishing. But he turned out to be wrong.

Public opinion is not an abstract concept. It is about us, what we the citizens of Croatia stand for. The failure of public opinion is therefore our failure. We did not react; we have nobody but ourselves to blame. Our personal paranoia, petty theft, and sealed lips all contributed to the bomb that killed Levar.

The task of propaganda is to shape this difference so that it creates a feeling that there is a threat from the other side and strengthens the urge for homogenization. Most important is the method of introducing hatred: it is most effective if people get used to it slowly, step by step, until they have absorbed it into their daily life.

When I see Karremans standing there in front of Mladić, so frightened that he is probably thinking, this is it, this is my end, I understand that he could not have defended anybody, not even himself. It is clear that Karremans will obey Mladić, whatever he demands. Karremans is defeated, the UN troops are defeated, Srebrenica is defeated; and I read it all in the face of the Dutch commander.

There were many other men in Bosnia doing even worse things to women. Why them, why were only the three of them being so severely punished? Looking at these three men, I could tell that they would serve their sentences regretting only that they were stupid enough to be caught or tricked into surrendering.

Пал… Развалился Советский Союз… А все ещё долго ждали помощи от большой и могучей страны, которой уже не было. Мой диагноз… Хотите? Смесь тюрьмы и детского сада – вот что такое социализм. Советский социализм. Человек отдавал государству душу, совесть, сердце, а взамен получал паёк. Тут уже кому как повезёт – у кого большой паёк, а у кого маленький. Одно одинаково – выдают его взамен души.

In a way, the children of the late sixties are the first “normal” generation. Their grandparents fought in World War II. Their parents grew up in poverty. They grew up in a time of security and abundance. I had to eat all the food on the plate, but my daughter did not. War for them was something they learned about in history class or saw in movies. It had happened more than twenty years before they were even born, and it was not quite real. For my generation, the war was much closer.

Yet it was not so long ago that his name was a synonym for fear to thousands of Muslims in Bosnia, so powerful was this man. Mladić was the person who kept Sarajevo besieged for three years, a city where he had a house and where his mother and his friends used to live, a city that he knew well. Twelve thousand people were killed in Sarajevo before he had to withdraw his forces. Then he moved on to Goražde and Srebrenica.

There is an air of tragedy about this couple. They have not met with the same violent end as the Ceausescus, but they suffer from the same affliction. They have no conception of the idea that people have to pay for their deeds in one way or another. They refuse—or are perhaps unable—to understand why all this is happening to them. If reality does not adjust to their ideas, well then, so be it. So much the worse for reality—until reality finally, brutally, intruded into their lives.

Milošević and Mira’s world is far removed from the outside world and impervious to reality. The Serbian journalist Slavoljub Djukić, in his biography entitled On, ona i mi (Him, Her and Us), writes that for Milošević and his wife “reality has no importance at all.” Because they had power, they created their own reality; this is what power meant to them. They still see themselves not as they really are but as they want each other to be—and want others to see them.

She was Milošević’s main, if not his only, political adviser. For a man who liked to decide everything single-handedly, as if state institutions did not exist, he depended heavily on her opinions. His biographers agree that she had such a hold on her husband that some of his political opponents used to whisper that he was under petticoat rule.