Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2012

I would like to congratulate

President Jeremić on his election and to thank Mr. Nassir

Abdulaziz Al-Nasser for having successfully presided

over the General Assembly at its previous session.

I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for having visited my

country this past July. As we are marking the twentieth

anniversary of our admission to the United Nations, his

visit came as a recognition of the fact that Bosnia and

Herzegovina has travelled a long way since joining the

Organization, having transformed itself from a recipient

of security assistance into a contributor to global peace

and security. I also want to commend the Secretary-General for

his tireless efforts to advance dialogue and cooperation,

and for his firm commitment to the core values and

principles of the United Nations. We in Bosnia and

Herzegovina recognize the importance of, and fully

support, his action agenda, which identified five

generational imperatives: prevention, a more secure

world, helping countries in transition, empowering

women and youth, and sustainable development.

Today’s world is the scene of unfolding crises and

mounting global challenges. The first and foremost of

these is the disaster in Syria. As we stand here, our

fellow Syrians are fighting against a brutal regime.

They are fighting to take their destiny into their own

hands. The regime of Bashar Al-Assad is answering

their yearning for freedom and democracy with guns

and bombs, just as his father’s regime did 30 years ago.

That is revolting and morally reprehensible — but so is

our collective failure to stop it.

Once again, we are idly standing by while a human

tragedy of dramatic proportions is unfolding before our

eyes. We should do our part to help the Syrian people’s

historic stand for freedom. We should do our part to

save the people of Syria from tyranny. We should, but

we are not.

The images coming from Syria remind us of the

tragedy of Bosnia. We in Bosnia and Herzegovina feel

the pain of the Syrian people as our own because we

went through the same horrors not that long ago. When

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Srebrenica with me this July to pay his respects to the genocide

victims, he said:

“The international community must be united

not to see any further bloodshed in Syria because

I do not want to see any of my successors, after 20

years, visiting Syria, apologizing for what we could

have done to protect the civilians in Syria — which

we are not doing now”.

His predecessor, Kofi Annan, stated in the report

on the fall of Srebrenica:

“Through error, misjudgment 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 ... The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt

our history forever” (A/54/549, para. 503)

Today, those words about the Organization’s failure to

respond to the tragedy in Syria ring true.

The best way to honour the victims of the Srebrenica

genocide would have been to learn the lessons of that

failure and never commit the same errors again. Sadly,

the United Nations, especially the Security Council,

has failed to do that. The international community has

chosen yet again to repeat the trial-and-error pattern

of the policies that failed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The resolutions, statements of concern, ineffective

sanctions, observers, and missions with no mandate

to protect civilians are actions that have deadly

consequences, as demonstrated in my country.

Make no mistake. Unless we act now, and act

decisively, to help the people of Syria and put an end to

the bloodshed there, that tragedy will haunt our history

forever, just like Srebrenica.

Developments at the beginning of the twenty-first

century defy rational prediction. Indeed, who could

have predicted such an explosion of freedom in the

Middle East? In the last few years, we have witnessed a

historic awakening in the Arab world. Profound social

and political changes aimed at creating democratic

societies are under way now — changes that have been

fermenting for decades. They are the best confirmation

that Muslims strive vigorously for freedom, dignity

and human rights. A well-educated, free-thinking

generation of young Arabs has finally broken the

chains of dictatorship. No force can prevent that new

generation from taking charge of its destiny.

As a non-permanent member of the Security

Council, Bosnia and Herzegovina strongly supported

the Arab peoples’ aspirations for greater freedom and

democracy. We acted to ensure that the international

community supported those who wanted free societies

instead of closed ones, the rule of law instead of

the rule of one individual, democracy instead of

dictatorship, justice and fairness instead of oppression

and corruption.

The stalemate in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict is also deeply troubling. The peace process is

not moving forward, and the chain of violence has not

been broken. A new impetus to negotiations is urgently

needed, because there is no alternative to a negotiated

solution. The Palestinians have every right — historical,

moral and legal — to a State of their own, but Israel has

every right to its security. The occupation of Palestinian

territories must end, but so must the terror and violence.

All attempts to create new realities on the ground in the

hope that they will be accepted as a starting point for

future negotiations must be rejected. The continuation

of settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian

territories continues to pose the most serious obstacle

to peace. Israel should immediately end all settlement

activities in the occupied Palestinian territories,

because those activities are illegal under international

law. Doing so is in Israel’s own best interest if it truly

desires peace with the Palestinians.

The state of affairs of 60 or 6,000 years ago is not

the right point of reference. The right point of reference

for a solution is the principle of the peaceful coexistence

of two sovereign States — an independent Palestine and

a secure Israel. That is the only realistic way to bring

about a just resolution to the conflict and to ensure

stability and progress in the Middle East. To achieve

such a solution, a more sincere attempt at good-faith

negotiations is needed, especially on the part of Israel.

The road to peace does not include ignoring United

Nations resolutions, squeezing the Palestinians onto

bits and pieces of the land that once belonged to their

fathers, and building settlements on those remaining

bits of land.

The Organization needs to send a strong message

demanding that its resolutions be respected and that

there be no double standards or chosen peoples when

it comes to the application of international legal norms

and human rights principles. Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed

disturbing violence linked to intolerance. The video

that sparked those developments is deeply insulting. It

deserves the strongest condemnation, and we absolutely

reject its content and message. There is no justification,

however, for responding to that movie with violence.

Violence in response to speech is unacceptable. There

can be no debate about that. Violence is no way to

honour religion. Responding to bigotry with violence

only further fans the flames of intolerance. We must

draw the line at violence, but we must also find a way to

prevent hate speech and bigotry. Yes, there is the right

to free speech, but there is also the right to dignity.

We cannot impose our ideology or our religion on

anyone else. We must promote tolerance, but we must

also promote mutual respect. That is why, as responsible

leaders, we should have a frank debate about the outer

limits of free expression when that freedom is abused

to incite hate and deliberately slander the dignity of

others.

There is no inherent contradiction between Islamic

and Western values. On the contrary, those values are

compatible. After all, they are derived from the same

sources. Throughout history, interactions between

those values have led to tremendous achievements.

There need be no clash. There are only those who need

to create a false perception of a clash in order to come

to power or maintain their hold on it.

So many societies in today’s world are in transition,

yearning to find a balance between traditional and

modern values. The relationship between the West and

the Islamic world and between their respective value

systems is going to be one of the most critical issues

of our time. That relationship will go through crises

and periods of misunderstanding and intolerance. In

the modern age, we need to continue to seek a formula,

which is to say a model, for how to reconcile Islamic

and Western values, East and West. No matter how hard

it may be, finding that formula is going to be essential

in the time ahead of us.

The human condition is one of diversity. Our human

race is a mosaic composed of a rich variety of peoples,

cultures and religions that shine together in a dynamic,

sparkling pattern. Our responsibility is to nurture and

protect that mosaic.

I come from a country whose historical experience

can offer valuable lessons in finding a model for peaceful

coexistence within such diversity. The whole world can benefit from the lessons that my country has learned

from constantly seeking to improve its understanding

and management of diversity. For hundreds of years,

its citizens lived in harmony, helping each other build

houses of worship that are physically almost leaning

on each other. The westernmost range of Orthodox

Christianity and Islam, the easternmost range of

Catholicism, Bosnia is a meeting point of civilizations,

a bridge between East and West. Its unique multi-ethnic

culture has been woven through a thousand years of

tolerance and respect among its citizens, regardless of

their ethnic and religious affiliation. That is why its

preservation and success, as a specific microcosm, is

crucial for the whole world.

However, owing to our recent past, a great struggle

is now under way in my country between the idea of

coexistence and the idea of division. I believe that the

outcome of that struggle will have a significant bearing

on resolving one of the greatest challenges of our

time, that of conflict versus cooperation. If the idea of

coexistence and cooperation does not prevail in Bosnia,

it can hardly prevail anywhere else in the world. If the

unique social fabric of my country, which was torn by

crimes and force, is not restored, that will be a defeat

for the very idea of coexistence, which will produce a

widening gap at one of the most delicate fault lines of

the world.

The growing power of humankind brings progress

and prosperity. Yet the selfish side of that power cuts

into the very substance on which our future depends,

namely, our physical habitat and our spiritual essence.

The world we live in is changing at a speed and

in a direction that is rightfully worrisome. Inequality,

injustice and intolerance are on the rise. There is more

conflict and less cooperation. There is ever more

violence and ever less compassion, solidarity, mutual

care, healthy interpersonal relations and family life.

People around the world are taking to the streets, which

is a dramatic warning that there is less and less fairness

in the societies in which they live.

Those unsettling trends can be reversed only by

decisive and coordinated global action. The future we

desire will not be just a utopia if we join our forces

to find the right solutions. Cooperative approaches are

difficult to accomplish but are needed more than ever. We are not perfect, and we can be better. We can

be wiser, more responsible, more willing to learn from

our past mistakes. Too often we have been prisoners

of our own mentalities. We perceive willingness to

compromise as a weakness, but just the opposite is

true — compromise requires courage. To build a future

we must make compromises. To succeed we must

stop indulging in manipulative kinds of populism. We

must break out of the worn and frayed patterns of the

past. We must turn to the future. Instead of having

endless debates about what has been, we must devote

ourselves to reaching agreements about what can be.

We must more correctly interpret the interests of those

we represent. We must listen to the views of others, no

matter how different those views might be. We must

understand each other better and respect each other

more.

Our most important mission in the time to come

will be to build bridges between cultures, religions and

civilizations — bridges of trust, understanding and

respect, bridges to reach out to problems the true nature

of which we have only begun to understand. That is hard

work that requires daring leadership. The Organization

has undergone difficult trials, but it has always been the

best framework for building those bridges. Let us keep

it that way as we go forward.