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Bosnian War Quotes

Browse 39 quotes about Bosnian War.

Bosnian War Quotes

“Please remember the heroes of the Bosnian War Like Izet Nanić, Safet Hadžić, and Mehdin Hodžić Who bravely ventured into situations that were unknown Risking their safety in the middle of a war zone Sing this powerful song for everyone to hear Sing so that the stories of Bosnians are clear and loud Pound your fists on the table and declare That justice must be firm, strong, and proud!”

JusticeCourageTraumaGenocideHeroesHeroismBosnian War
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“I barely escaped Sarajevo in one piece Chetniks looked directly at my mother They were eager to kill us like mice She saw their evil eyes, as cold as ice They wanted to ensure our extinction They wanted to plan our demise But despite their ammunition We were strategic, clever, and wise Imagine being in a situation like that What would you do? What would you think? How would you deal with the intensity Of being afraid to even blink? Think about people that matter to you most What if they became like a distant ghost? What if all your friends, family, and favorite things Suddenly became birds with clipped wings?”

EvilHatredGenocideKillersBosnian War
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“The Dark Cloud Is the loneliness you go through because isolation is common and friends are not Is the story of 50,000 raped Bosniak women which history forgot Is the intense pressure of being crushed under a pile of mental weight Is the backstabbing ex-boyfriend who took you for granted and compelled you to question the integrity of your relationship, including the first date”

LonelinessDepressionWomen S RightsRapeRape CultureBosnian WarBosnia And Herzegovina
Book:The Dark Cloud
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“In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.”

WarDeathCausesBulletsMartyrdomBosniaNear Death ExperienceChurchillBosnian WarSarajevo1992MortarsJohn BurnsSiege Of Sarajevo
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”

WarGenocideAnti WarEthnic CleansingPacifismLeftismHumanitarian InterventionIsolationismBosnian WarInterventionismBosnia And HerzegovinaNeoconservatismNoninterventionismNeocons
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Mama clutched the wall, her face white with terror. 'Stupid girl!' She shook me by my shoulders. 'You can’t run out like that! Snipers will get you.' Like a long thin finger, my hometown of Srebrenica stretched in the valley between steep hills, clustered along the main road leading in and out of town. The green canopy of the birch tree forest looked like green fairy floss dotted with the burgundy terracotta tile roofs of white rendered houses. The nearby hills were a perfect vantage point for snipers. In the time it took them to shoot once, miss, and correct their target, an innocent bystander would have time to take just one step.” Fragments”

WarSiegeBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:The Cuckoo's Song
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“A Mall and Bullet Holes" While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country devastated and drained by the wars of the global elite, exactly like mine, I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side… On the left side, there was an old residential building filled with bullet holes that looked like eyewitnesses to all the free death that took place here in a war that has since ended, yet its real causes and the criminals behind it are still lurking in every corner, like infected pus ready to burst at any moment of awareness… I wondered bitterly: When will the world understand that violence never erupts inadvertently, that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon by a small elite that decides in advance that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality, must be disciplined with free death for those who resist! It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that the minds and souls of all survivors must permanently be pierced with bullet holes! In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes… I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes, like those we see in malls… The elderly woman looked at them as if wishing to tell them about all that happened here, but they didn’t notice her existence for their eyes were fixated on their phones… I painfully wondered then: Has anyone told them about what happened here? Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks? Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted, told them about the real price she’d paid with all the holes left in her heart and her history for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods? [Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

WarDeathViolenceCapitalismArabic PoetryBalkansDivide And ConquerBosnian WarRuling ClassBalkanization
Author:Louis Yako
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“My mother personally knew Nusreta Sivac, who was held, tortured, and raped at the camp for two months. I admire Nusreta’s extraordinary courage and fortitude in enduring the horror of genocide and speaking boldly about her experiences. She is a champion for women’s rights and a hero of the Bosnian people. She motivated and vehemently advocated for justice by persuading other Bosniak rape victims to come forward and take legal action against their perpetrators. Thanks to Nusreta’s efforts, rape in the context of war is categorized as a war crime under international law. She was instrumental in helping convict her rapist and bringing him to justice. She was continually raped for two months in captivity. Sivac also spent years collecting evidence and testimonies from rape survivors and constructing legal cases which were presented to the ICTY. For centuries, rape was considered a byproduct of war. Are women just considered spoils of war? Her contributions are a powerful achievement because they mark the first time in history that an international court convicted war crimes solely for sexual violence. I applaud Nusreta for being a pioneer.”

WarInspirationInspirational QuotesMotivationFeminismGenocideRapeConcentration CampBosnian WarOmarska Camp
Author:Aida Mandic
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“Bosnia's war had its visual hallmarks. Parks that were turned into cemeteries, refugee families piled onto horse-drawn carts, stop-or-die checkpoints with mines across the road. The most hideous hallmark of all was the blackened patch of ground in the center of town. It always meant the same thing, a destroyed mosque. The goal of ethnic cleansing was not simply to get rid of Muslims; it was to destroy all traces that they had ever lived in Bosnia. The goal was to kill history. If you want to do that, then you must rip out history's heart, which in the case of Bosnia's Muslim community meant the destruction of its mosques. Once that was done, you could reinvent the past in whatever distorted form you wanted, like Frankenstein. p. 85”

HistoryEthnic CleansingYugoslaviaBosnian WarDestruction Of History
Book:Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War
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“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”

United StatesIslamIsraelOilPropagandaIranFascismNational SecurityImperialismSpainFanaticismCiaNazismChristiansReligious ExtremismGazaLeftistsHamasWar CrimesMuslimsChemical WeaponsTheocracyAntisemitismKosovoBalkansPalestiniansBosnian WarHenry KissingerIslamismBill ClintonCatholicsSaddam HusseinEdward Said1981Noam ChomskyBosnia And HerzegovinaPloIsraelisAndalusiaKosovo WarBaath PartyCaliphateAriel SharonAzmi BisharaFatahHalabjaHalabja Poison Gas AttackKnessetPolitics Of IsraelTakbir
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States.”

LeftismAntiwar MovementBosnian WarNoam ChomskyAnti Americanism
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Nura Alispahić, the mother of Azmir, had her entire family killed Her husband (Alija) and her two sons (Admir and Azmir) are all gone In addition to her brother, 12 of her nephews, and five brother-in-laws Everyone was wiped out from the face of the Earth, their destiny was drawn In addition to all of the hell that she went through Nura’s daughter died after the Bosnian War because of intense grief Why do Serbs get to do whatever they want to Bosniaks? But then receive prison sentences that are very brief?”

WarHuman RightsGenocideBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“There is a video online that shows the brutality of this crime How a Serbian Orthodox priest blessed them to show support These Serbs were so confident that Chetniks would win the war They thought that they would never see the inside of a court The cameraman of the Scorpions massacre video was disappointed Because the camera’s battery was almost out Can you imagine the level of evil that lived inside them? This is why good people have to fight against such scum”

WarHuman RightsGenocideBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“Serbs murdered Safet Fejzić, Azmir Alispahić, Sidik Salkić As well as Smajil Ibrahimović, Dino Salihović, and Juso Delić These killers called themselves the Scorpions to display power They thought they were gods, that they ruled society’s tower There is a video online that shows the brutality of this crime How a Serbian Orthodox priest blessed them to show support These Serbs were so confident that Chetniks would win the war They thought that they would never see the inside of a court The cameraman of the Scorpions massacre video was disappointed Because the camera’s battery was almost out Can you imagine the level of evil that lived inside them? This is why good people have to fight against such scum”

WarHuman RightsGenocideBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“More than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys Were slaughtered mercilessly by Serbs in Srebrenica Who wanted Bosnia and Herzegovina’s land Who murdered in cold blood, it was all planned Mass graves were found on every single corner Because torture is how Chetniks spend their time They wanted to display their dominance over us And commit acts against humanity, their favorite crime”

WarHuman RightsGenocideBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“A member of the Red Berets spoke openly About how starving Bosniaks in Srebrenica Was like a cat and mouse game to play It was how nationalism continued to slay Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Karremans and General Ratko Mladić Were seen drinking a toast together to celebrate All of the innocent lives that were destroyed All of the Bosniak heads that were on a plate”

WarHuman RightsGenocideBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.”

WarGovernmentReligionPoliticsLeadershipHistoryDemocracyBosniaBosnian WarBosnia And Herzegovina
Book:Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia
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“During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.”

ReligionHumourExtremismReligious ExtremismJewsMuslimsBosniaIntellectualsBosnian WarZealotry1990sCroatsSerbsIslamic ExtremismDavid RieffCity CouncilsSontagZenica
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“The Omarska geological region is rich in iron ore and has been historically lucrative for mining companies. After the Bosnian Genocide, The Mittal Steel Company bought the rights to extract iron ore from the camp site. In 2005, they announced plans to build a memorial replacing one of the camp buildings. Due to active political hostility from Serbs against building a memorial, the idea was abandoned. Bosniaks argue that the bodies of all victims should first be extracted and respectfully cremated before the memorial construction to avoid desecrating dead bodies. 20 years after the Omarska genocidal nightmare, there was no progress for building a memorial.”

Social JusticeInjusticeGenocideConcentration CampBosnian WarOmarska Camp
Author:Aida Mandic
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“Bosniak civilians were forced to flee their homes due to the constant shelling and army attacks by May 1992. Most of the civilians were taken as prisoners or surrendered to the Serb forces. The residents were then gathered and moved to the prison camps operated by the Serb forces in the surrounding area. Within 3 weeks of the hostile takeover of the government entities, the Serb forces mounted large scale military offense and subsequently started rounding up civilians and moving them to the Omarska camp.”

WarSocial JusticeGenocideConcentration CampBosnian WarBosnia And HerzegovinaOmarska CampOmarska
Author:Aida Mandic
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“The Bosnian Serb forces operated the Omarska concentration camp to torture, murder, rape, and abuse captured Bosnian civilians, intellectuals, and politicians in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina (Prijedor municipality). The camp held over 7,000 innocent Bosnian civilians as prisoners for more than five months during 1992. Several hundred people died due to constant abuse by the Serb forces including mass executions, starvation, beatings, repeated sexual abuse, and horrifying living conditions. The camp guards frequently cut the throats of the Bosniak captives. Prisoners ate spoiled food found by scavenging for it.”

WarGenocideConcentration CampBosnian WarOmarska Camp
Author:Aida Mandic
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“The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep. And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.”

WarReligionPoliticsChristianityRevolutionIslamLiberalismCatholicismDictatorshipPersecutionEthnicityJihadLeftismBosniaKosovoBalkansBosnian WarBill ClintonSaddam HusseinBertolt BrechtNeoconservatismKosovo WarSlobodan MilosevicA Long Short WarHalliburtonPersecution Of MuslimsThe Weekly StandardTrent Lott
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“Amor Mašović, the president of the Bosnian government’s Commission for Tracing Missing Persons, confirms that there are hundreds of undiscovered mass graves. To this day, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is helping identify dead bodies from such mass graves, using technologies such as DNA testing. As many as 150 prisoners were killed every single night in Omarska Camp. Estimates from the United States also suggest that, at a minimum, several hundreds of civilians were murdered during the camp’s evacuation period. Actual numbers are likely to be much higher. All the toilets in the camp were blocked. There were human feces throughout the area. The prisoners’ extremely deplorable and terrifying conditions were confirmed by a British journalist named Ed Vulliamy in a testimony. He also mentioned that the detainees consumed water from an industrially polluted river causing them severe diarrhea and intestinal diseases. There were zero criminal reports filed against the Serb perpetrators. The victims were constantly subjected to abuse resulting in serious psychological and physical deterioration.”

Human RightsActivismGenocideBosnian WarConcentration Camps
Author:Aida Mandic
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“During the Bosnian War in 1992, the Serb forces took over the Prijedor municipality. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) repeatedly broadcasted the Serb forces’ capture of Prijedor on radio as a display of significant victory. For further hostile takeover, 400 men were added to the Serb forces in Cirkin Polje (town in Prijedor) to seize Prijedor’s governing bodies such as the municipality, post office, police, bank, courts etc. By April, they successfully captured these government entities. This forceful takeover by Serb politicians was declared to be an illegal coup d’état by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The coup was a cold blooded, pre-planned strategic effort to capture Prijedor and convert it into a pure Serb municipality. These strategic plans were never concealed. Milomir Stakić played an important role in the strategic capture by the Serb forces.”

WarHuman RightsActivismGenocideHuman Rights ActivistHuman Rights ViolationsBosnian War
Author:Aida Mandic
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“I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs. They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.”

ActivismGenocideBosnian War
Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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