It is an honour to address
the General Assembly at its sixty-third session.
Allow me to express my gratitude to Mr. Srgjan
Kerim, who ably presided over the Assembly during
the preceding year, and to congratulate you, Father
Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the new President of the
General Assembly. I also thank you, Sir, for an
inspiring appeal for respect for basic, universal ethical
values.
The first time I stood at this rostrum was in May
1992, as the Foreign Minister of a newly independent
Bosnia and Herzegovina. At that time, I recounted the
unspeakable atrocities that were unfolding in my
country. I also warned that, if not stopped, such
atrocities would only get worse. In fact, I merely asked
that Bosnia and Herzegovina be accorded the right to
defend itself, the right guaranteed by the Charter.
We know what has happened since. Some in the
international community insisted on maintaining the
arms embargo imposed by the Security Council in
1991, thus adding to the obviously overwhelming
military advantage of Milosevic’s regime, which was
bent on destroying Bosnia and Herzegovina and its
people. They justified this course by claiming that
lifting the arms embargo meant adding oil to the fire.
The result was that the fire was quelled with the blood
of the innocent.
According to International Committee of the Red
Cross data, 200,000 people — 12,000 of them
children — were killed, up to 50,000 women were
raped, and 2.2 million people were forced to flee their
homes. This was a veritable genocide and sociocide.
The intent of the perpetrators of this genocide was to
forever destroy the unique multi-ethnic fabric of
Bosnia and Herzegovina through mass slaughter, rape,
torture, abuse, expulsion and plunder. In spite of this,
defenders of our country conducted themselves
honourably, as demonstrated by the acquittal by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia of most of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s
military leadership.
All this culminated in Srebrenica in July 1995.
The International Court of Justice — the court of this
Organization — ruled in its Judgment of 26 February
2007 that “the Bosnian Serbs devised and implemented
a plan to execute as many as possible of the military
aged Bosnian Muslim men present in the enclave”
(para. 292) and that
“the acts committed at Srebrenica ... were
committed with the specific intent to destroy in
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part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and
Herzegovina as such; and accordingly … these
were acts of genocide, committed by members of
the [Army of Republika Srpska] in and around
Srebrenica from about 13 July 1995.” (para. 297)
Through its acts and omissions, the United
Nations, by its own admission, bears part of the
responsibility for the crimes committed at Srebrenica.
In fact, the Secretary-General’s 1999 report on
Srebrenica unequivocally states:
“Through error, misjudgement and an inability to
recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we
failed to do our part to help save the people of
Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass
murder ... Srebrenica crystallized a truth
understood only too late by the United Nations
and the world at large: that Bosnia was as much a
moral cause as a military conflict. The tragedy of
Srebrenica will haunt our history forever.”
(A/54/549, para. 503)
We do not want the United Nations to be haunted.
This Organization’s credibility is too important to the
world to carry the burden of this failure. Errors can be
committed, but errors must not be repeated. We want
the United Nations to right the wrongs. In fact,
international law mandates that this must be done. The
International Law Commission’s articles on State
responsibility for internationally wrongful acts,
adopted in resolution 56/83 of 12 December 2001,
mandate that “No State shall recognize as lawful a
situation created by a serious breach [of a peremptory
norm of general international law]”, which clearly
includes the crime of genocide and crimes against
humanity, “nor render aid or assistance in maintaining
that situation” (article 41).
If those principles had been applied, would the
institutions identified by the International Court of
Justice as perpetrators of genocide still exist? Would
vast portions of a country remain ethnically clean?
Would over a million refugees and displaced persons
remain outside their homes? In short, do these
principles allow for the arrest of Karadzic and the
simultaneous preservation of the results of his project?
In fact, just today The Hague Tribunal announced a
revised indictment against Karadzic that charges him
with genocide and crimes against humanity, against
both Bosnians and Croats in 27 municipalities in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. This process will further
implicate the Milosevic regime in the planning and
commission of those crimes.
We cannot bring back the dead, but we can give
dignity and justice to the survivors. What we say today
is aimed not at the past, but at the future, and not only
for Bosnia and Herzegovina. We owe it to not only the
victims and survivors, but humanity as a whole. The
message to the would-be perpetrators of crimes in the
name of a twisted ideology should be crystal-clear: do
not even think about it; your terror will not pay off.
That should be the message.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we had the
opportunity to make that true by a consistent
implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement,
which ended the aggression, stopped the genocide, and
brought peace. These were its major accomplishments,
and their value cannot be overemphasized.
The Dayton Peace Agreement, however, was also
intended to reverse the effects of genocide and ethnic
cleansing. It had all the necessary elements to do so.
Instead, in the words of the Constitutional Court of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, its main provisions have been
a victim of:
“a systemic, continuing and deliberate practice of
the public authorities of Republika Srpska with
the goal of preventing the so-called minority
returns, either through direct participation in
violent incidents or through the abdication of
responsibility to protect the people from ...
violent attacks due solely to their ethnic
background”.
Dayton never intended such ethnic apartheid to
take root in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is not the
implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, but
the violation of its core principles, that led to this
result. It would be a grave mistake to recognize this
result as lawful and legitimate. It is the responsibility
of this Organization to make it right. Just as we should
not have been forced to smuggle arms into our own
country to defend ourselves, we should not be forced
now to smuggle basic human rights, justice and
democracy into Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Without righting this wrong can we genuinely
celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the adoption of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights this
December? Moreover, can we celebrate the sixtieth
anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the
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Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
if the first and only Judgment of the International
Court of Justice on the crime of genocide remains in
the Court’s archives?
Now is the time to right these wrongs. We are
about to start work on the new Constitution of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, and the outcome of that process will
answer many of these questions.
To those who now seek to legitimize the systemic
violations of the Dayton Peace Agreement, we all must
say: make no mistake, genocide will not be rewarded.
That is the responsibility of this Organization.
Rewarding genocide would send a dangerous message
throughout the world, and would surely undermine the
chances of peace and stability in Bosnia and
Herzegovina and the region.
Seekers of justice are not the enemies of peace.
They are the guardians of peace. As the Secretary-
General said today, justice is the pillar of peace and
stability. That is what this statement is all about.
Certainly, there are those in Bosnia and Herzegovina
who would not agree, but they are surely not the
victims of genocide.
We have not forgotten the help we received from
many of the countries represented here today, a number
of whose soldiers, diplomats, aid workers and
journalists died in Bosnia and Herzegovina while
working to end the aggression, bring peace and ease
the suffering, or to make sure that the rest of the world
knew about it. For that we thank them once again, and
renew our sympathy to their families.
An even greater number of countries have
assisted us in rebuilding our society after the
aggression, and we extend our heartfelt gratitude for
that as well. Bosnia and Herzegovina still needs help in
this regard, and we hope that we can work together in
order to ensure permanent peace and stability in my
country, the region and the world.