Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2008

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.