EUROPEAN APARTHEID – August 21, 2007

– interview with Mr. Muhamed Sacirbey, former Bosnia's Minister of Foreign Affairs (1995-96) and Ambassador

to the United Nations (1992-2000).

Read also our previous discussion with Ambassador Sacirbey of July 30, 2007

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Sebastian Aulich: What is your book project about?

Muhamed Sacirbey: It’s really meant to be a historical

record. I face the same kind of issues that every writer faces.

Particularly, one who tries to address very political, very intellectual matter: finding the fine line between being entertaining and maintaining someone’s interest versus telling a very detailed story. Because once you get involved in maintaining a historic record then I think you have an obligation to tell a story in complete fashion.

A lot of what happens today is not about how you get from “A” to “X”. Everyone wants to know what “Z” is. So I want to talk about how you get from “A” to “X”, as well as about “Y” and about ”Z”, because there is a lot between “A” and “X”. Today is also much more about celebrity, a lot about easy consumptions. So I think what I want to do is a project which has some attraction to a broader audience, if you want to have mass appeal. There will be videos, photographs that will be appealing to this level. But, as I found out the historical record is really being written by those who have most reason right now to be self serving about it. Funny enough, it’s not really Bosnians and Serbians or even Croatians. There are a lot of records being written by U.S. State Department. For example the State Department has something called “Secret History of Dayton Accords” and it’s a well written document, but it’s also a bit of a fairy tale. When one reads this, you would think that in the process leading to the Dayton Accords, they were simultaneously very clever, very seductive and virginal, which of course is rather contradictory. Of course, it is too self serving and reflects away accountability.

Much of what happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the Balkans itself, was the responsibility of the big powers, the State Department, the British Foreign Office, French Office, the EU and to some extent the UN. It was laid at the doorstep of the UN, but in many ways I find the UN to be least problematic, even though when I was working within that institution, it appeared the most culpable. The UN is a tip of the iceberg. All the things the world didn’t really want to address very coherently tended to be dumped on the UN at that time. We thought it was the new world order, so we thought the UN was kind of a new global parliament. The result we are seeing now is much more minimalist.

SA: How did it happen that you became Bosnia’s Ambassador to the United Nations?

My family and the family of President Izetbegovic were long time friends. When Mr. Izetbegovic was running for the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that time it was still one of the republics of former Yugoslavia, we actually re-established our contacts. My father and mother, before we came to the United States, had been politically active in Bosnia. Consequently, through that contact I was gradually drawn in. My vision was not that Bosnia and Herzegovina would become independent and I don’t think that was the vision of President Izetbegovic and most people around him. It was rather a vision that in many ways Yugoslavia would become more of a confederal arrangement. I anticipated that the key to the development of democracy, development of open society, would be actually economics. So when I was working as an investment banker during that period, I thought I could help establish links and provide some experience in the investment banking, economic area. I really had no desire to go back to Bosnia, I found myself being very much comfortable and very much to be American. So my involvement was going to be maybe a hand across the Ocean rather than taking a full step into the situation.

SA: Your primary identity is American you said, but you accepted a post to become Bosnia’s Ambassador. You did differently in comparison to what Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinski did. At some point they were also asked by Polish people and the Czech people if they would accept an office in their home countries, but both of them declined such opportunity saying that their primary identities are American. You did differently.

Well, when I assumed the job, that is the job title, there was a genocide going on and there was aggression going on and there was high sense of urgency. The United States and much of the free world were not doing anything at all. So my opportunity to contribute was that as a Bosnian and Herzegovinian, and I understood it at that time I would be a link between the people

of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the people of the West, United States and Europe. I think, a lot of people had a misconception

of what the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina were all about.

As soon as you use a word “Muslim” they thought these were people somewhere from the Middle East, that they were really not Europeans, that they really did not belong to Europe.

In the end I had to evaluate what was my own personal motivation, why did I get involved. Was it because I was going to make some money? No. Was it because I would become famous? No.  I really did not see this job as a road to fame. In fact I thought I would be doing this job for only a few months and it would be finished. At the same time, I have to admit, that the idea of being in public light was not something that scared me, it was natural to me because of my life as an investment banker, as an attorney and as an American football player.

What really was my motivation was a sense of injustice and not against my Bosnian identity but against my American identity. I faced an option of being someone who is on the sideline yelling down and saying “this is unfair, this shouldn’t be happening” versus being on the field dressed in the Bosnian uniform. It was to me rather a simple choice. You put on the uniform, you put on the helmet, the shoulder pads, put on the football shoes and you go on the field to perform the opportunity, the responsibility given to you as a Bosnian official.

SA: It looks to me as a smart move. Nothing was happening in Bosnia’s cause, Europe wouldn’t act, and the U.S. wouldn’t act either, of course until you persuade people in America to get involved. So what Bosnia does is, it gets a Bosnian American, educated in the best American universities, who has good business connections and experience, and hires him as a Bosnia’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

You are assuming that there was a lot of calculation to this process and I hope that was true, but sometimes I have this feeling that I was the only person there who was in the position to do the job. Back then there was not much of Bosnian diaspora. Now there is probably 350,000 Bosnians living in the U.S., perhaps even more. But back then there was maybe only a couple of thousands and most of them were not in New York, were not lawyers and investment bankers, maybe many of them didn’t even feel any connection to Bosnia. So of course I tended to fit at least the superficial profile, but I don’t know that in fact all of those criteria were calculated by President Izetbegovic. I think that I was just there and someone had to help the bureaucratic process of Bosnia joining the U.N. and there were many bureaucrats on the other side that were quite intense on playing the game of creating bureaucratic hurdles for Bosnia joining.

For example seven days before Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the United Nations we were told that Bosnia’s application at the U.N. was missing. How could it be missing? At 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon, the week before we were supposed to join, I was told that there was no Bosnia’s application. Bosnia and Herzegovina would not join with Croatia and Slovenia. Well, by 4 o’clock, I found out that application was drowning in the bottom of someone’s desk. Purportedly, the reason that it was there is that the application possibly may not have been compliant. It had been faxed rather than delivered with actual signature. They suggested it would take some time to resolve whether it was a proper signature or whether an ink signature from President Izetbegovic would be required. Of course, it was an effort at derailing Bosnia’s admission to the family of nations.

For a second, I was drawn into this technical discussion. I relayed that there was no communication with Sarajevo except through telephone and fax, because the city was fully encircled, besieged. Then I realized it was just a game, so I called foreign minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who is now the member of Bosnia’s presidency, Dr. Haris Silajdzic. Dr. Silajdzic was in New York and at 4:40 he signed a new application, at 5 o’clock we demanded a meeting with the Secretary General Boutros Ghali. He said he couldn’t meet with us. At 5:30 we were in the elevator to his office to deliver a new application. So I played this more as a football player rather than bureaucrat. This is how I earned my reputation.

SA: At the moment you assumed your post, was your priority to persuade the United Nations to act or rather to influence the United States to get involved? Because you were an American and a former football player, so somebody most probably assumed that you would have an assertive style and you would be lobbying for Bosnia’s cause rather aggressively.

Well, if you understand American football, it’s like in all other sports an “A” plan and there are several alternative plans “B”, “C” and so on. I saw the world of May 22, 1992, as a one based on the new world order. We saw very aggressive intervention in Kuwait against Saddam Hussein, and maybe I was naïve but I thought the intervention in Kuwait had also at least something, a bit, to do with the human rights, with international legality. I opted to make a point as a lawyer, that in fact there was a violation of international law in Bosnia, violation of humanitarian law, and this needed to be confronted.

This was also a “threat to international peace and security,” which is a key phrase from the United Nations, as you may know. We had pursued a logical path. We believed in its own self interest that the international community would say “enough is enough”. Because of what was going on in Croatia, and if you recall the massacre in Vukovar, would tell you that the situation could easily evolve into mass murder, genocide. For some reason though, the world powers, including the United States, were not willing to acknowledge this responsibility. I remember a good friend from the U.S. Mission, Stuart Seldowitz, who became Bosnia expert at U.S. State Department and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations: he said that the United States, that is the Administration, was starting to see itself as being the world’s cop. And he said, if you know anything about cops, they have an unthankful job and don’t get paid very well. As it turned out, the United States has become the world’s cop, maybe not being paid very well, maybe not even being appreciated much.

However, this was more about strategic interests rather than being the cop in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia and Herzegovina has had huge ramifications in terms of fractures, between the Western world and the Muslim world, between Europe and the United States, and the gap between the United Nations that we have today and the United Nations that we could have had.

Frankly, in 1992 I would be expecting much more. So you are right, my first play was to bring about an intervention that would stop the genocide and the war. Why not? And I, as a Bosnian and an American, had no desire for revenge on Serbia, Belgrade, quite to the contrary, even then I understood that the future one has is within one’s neighborhood, so you better make sure that you have good relations with Croats, Serbs, the Macedonians, the Albanians, the Slovenes. However, it has not always worked out that way.

Maybe there was one other critical reason why one would expect the United Nations, that is the international community, to intervene in May 1992. Almost a year earlier, in September 25, 1991, the United Nations has adopted the Security Council resolution imposing an arms embargo upon the entire territory of Yugoslavia. In this way, there was already a de-facto intervention, even Bosnia and Herzegovina’s sovereignty was recognized. Option “A” was that there was already a decisive intervention impeding Bosnia’s defense, so now there should be a concrete intervention to stop the war. If not, then step “B” is: you review and lift the arms embargo and allow Bosnia and Herzegovina to defend itself. Option “C” was, obviously, to find whatever means necessary for Bosnia to defend itself.

SA: When you take a look at U.N. history, how it reacted to previous genocides, the United Nations never did much in such kind of cases. You have examples in reference to Cambodia, Northern Iraq, Rwanda and other places, but still you say that you hoped that the United Nations would do something. In 1992 when you assumed your post, what you really had was the arms embargo, which unfortunately accelerated the genocide, because, like you said, it resulted in the situation that the Bosnian victims were unable to defend themselves.

Well, the Cambodian and the Kurdish genocides, although they did happen with little doubt but maybe not so much visibility, are different from what happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina in terms of time and context. First of all, the genocide that occurred in Cambodia and within Iraq, were genocides within the borders of a sovereign state perpetrated by that state’s own authorities. From my perspective it does not mean that you should not intervene but there is more legal complexity. Also, during the tensions of the Cold War, intervention in Iraq and Cambodia would have certainly more unpredictable global implications. However, Kuwait has established a new precedent when the Soviet Union has been dissolved. In fact Soviet Union was becoming much more, that is its component parts: Russia and the other states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, were becoming now as one would say “us” rather than “them”. There was at least some chance that everyone who belonged to the United Nations would be “we” versus some other third group or the nonaligned or unaligned.

So the genocide in Bosnia happened after the precedent of Kuwait and after the collapse of the Soviet Union that broke down the Cold War. Second of all, this genocide was being conducted by one state against another, unlike the situation we saw in Cambodia and Northern Iraq. In 1993, I became an agent for Bosnia and Herzegovina in a case we filed against Serbia for violation of Genocide Convention, what is a topic for another long discussion, I guess.

SA: How much was American foreign policy at that time influenced by past examples of inaction toward different genocides and how much was it an outcome of a struggle of personalities and opposing ideas promoted by people like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke?

Personalities of people involved have huge influence. Sometimes it’s personality in terms of intellectual capacity to understand the issue. Many people in the first Bush Administration did not consider issue of former Yugoslavia to be terribly important to how the new world order was evolving. Some of them were preoccupied with elections of 1992.  Others just considered this to be a continuation of a kind of tribal, ethnic war going on for hundreds of years, and that’s of course always the answer if you don’t want to do anything. You then just say it’s a civil war happening for centuries and everybody knows that you can describe every segment of the world as a sort of tribal or ethnic conflict continued for centuries, whether its Poland and Russia, whether it’s France and Germany or France and England, whether it’s the Ottomans and Russians. All conflicts could fit that line, sometime. So that’s an empty excuse.

However, people who were familiar with the region happened to be mostly influenced by Slobodan Milosevic himself. Eagleburger, who became the de facto Secretary of State, was previously stationed for quite some time in Belgrade. Henry Kissinger also had some connections. Most had initially seen Milosevic as a reformer. Milosevic has spent much time in the United States as a banker. Some saw him as some sort of opportunity for change rather than a dictator and ultimately the orchestrator of genocide.

On the other hand people who actually came to see Bosnia as being critical, people like Madeleine Albright or Brzezinski, they actually came from that region, so they understood that there was a certain element of generalization, perhaps prejudice, being applied.

I’ve been to Krakow in Poland and I know there is the clock tower in which a bugler toots the horn to mark the passing of every hour and at the end of his play the horn makes this disharmonic sound. When I first heard it, I asked the young Polish woman with me, “does this guy know how to play the horn?” She was at first chuckling, a bit uncomfortably. Then she explained that actually the reason he goes off key at the end is because it signifies the moment when the Turks attacked Krakow and an arrow was shot to his throat by a Turkish archer just as he was sounding the alarm of the invading Turks.

Of course, this is an hourly reminder of invasion of the Turks, presumably of Islam. So of course to someone like Zbigniew Brzezinski it could have been seen as a threat from outside. However, Zbig had faced the indoctrination of bias and had consciously looked beyond it to some agenda with greater relevance, shared relevance and integrity. But I also found out that most of the people particularly from Central and Eastern Europe, even the peasants, they actually do read their history.  So, if they are bigoted, they know the source what it is that they are prejudiced about. One can challenge the rationality of such bias especially when used as basis for political appeal.

We see in much of the United States a prejudice of ignorance and what we see in Western Europe is prejudice of arrogance. I am afraid that to overcome these prejudices of ignorance and arrogance in one case you have to act as an American cowboy so you can tell the arrogant not to be so cocky. On the other hand, to counter the ignorance, the prejudice of ignorance, you have to educate and somehow allow people to understand that there are other people on the other side, who are very much like them.

SA: You said that the unwillingness to intervene was also due to France’s endeavors to create a new kind of Europe, this is a Europe without NATO and American presence.

I think I am being a little bit unkind to France. My words should be more focused on Mitterrand himself. This was Mitterrand’s idea and Mitterrand was unfortunately influenced by some ugly prejudices. This prejudice was not so much of being pro-Serb as many assumed, but being frankly anti-Muslim. And as we now know, he was also anti-Jewish and almost anti-everything which wasn’t exactly like him. I don’t think that Mitterrand had ever outgrown Vichy France and its bigotry. His vision of a new Europe in many ways developed not in 1970’s, 1980’s or even 1990’s but it developed in 1940’s. It was not progressive and open, but quasi feudal.

SA: When one says about U.S. response, one faces a situation in which Americans do not care that much about what is going on in the outside world. They actually have whatever they need over here. They have peace, they have economic prosperity. Why would they want to focus on bad things that go on in some distant parts of the world?

But it’s no more quite understood that way. The problem with American reaction to new world’s events is that it is not a very calculated reaction. It’s not a reaction of a surgeon’s scalpel. It is a reaction of an axe.

SA: But when you expect something from the U.S. you assume that the U.S. would be a moral leader in overcoming such crises. However, when you take a look at the U.S. history, this country never wanted to be a leader and was rather forced to become such. For the majority of its history, the U.S. was pretty much isolated from the rest of the world and only until the First World War and the Second World War, America emerged as a global empire. The U.S. didn’t even have ideological and moral background predestining it to be the world’s leader. Now, you are saying that in cases of genocide the U.S. never assumed any kind of leadership and was merely acting as a policeman, even further damaging its image of a global leader.

I think that in 1992, one would assume that the United States had an opportunity to assert its moral leadership, which would of course transfer into political capital, authority. Unfortunately the U.S. only managed some part of that moral leadership and unfortunately it was not enough to counter the ugly ideology of Islamic radicals. The United States for long time was being the number one guy on top of this hill and was open to accusations of all sorts of policies that were characterized as anti-Islamic as well as selective. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the U.S. had a chance to show that America could act objectively when applying its policies and not being only seen as pro-Israel, pro-Western Europe, but in certain situations being seen as defending the rights, the law, those who were threatened.

Although I do conclude that the United States in many ways was more forthcoming than France and the U.K., but ultimately the result we see today in Bosnia and Herzegovina is flawed, morally and politically short. So in fact it has been a good selling point for al-Qaeda and other terrorists. Nonetheless, I think that the United States had much greater opportunity in 1992 to reclaim the moral high grounds, which it had in 1945. In the end, there was not even political understanding and political will to do this. So in the context of your previous question, there was lack of personalities on the U.S. side.

The key U.S. personality in that crisis was and is Richard Holbrooke. Although Richard claims to be a friend of Bosnia, ultimately he converted more into a perverse pragmatist. He also took the road of expediency and the perverse deals that such translates into. Richard deserves a great deal credit for translating pragmatism into helping bring an end to war. Unfortunately he deserves also a great blame for his methodology. The method he chose, the role he chose, was to make one of the ugliest, in effect, alliances with Slobodan Milosevic. He explicitly or implicitly signaled a green light to and allowed Milosevic, and Mladic, and their military, to create new facts on the ground, to overrun Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde.

These were NATO and UN protected areas. Consequently, his “deal” violated the fabric as well as resolutions of NATO and the United Nations. In return, he garnered a short term benefit: to establish the new map on the ground into a politically sanctioned cessation of hostilities. However, this is neither a solution consistent with the principles or ultimately the strategic interests of our Euro-Atlantic family.

I wouldn’t even call it a pragmatic solution, I would rather call it an expedient solution. In other words, many of the people who were at some time for doing the right thing, the long term progressive and sustainable in Bosnia, ultimately used expediency that suited their own political agenda, frequently personal ambitions.

SA: But that was the time when the Soviet Union collapsed, and in fact it was also a hard time for the U.S. itself because during the Cold War there was this devotion to multilateralism that Western nations should cooperate closely with each other to face the communist threat. When the Soviet Union dissolved, this ideology of Cold War multilateralism remained in place. There was not enough time to adjust the foreign policy of the U.S. to different global circumstances, in terms of evolution from multilateralism to acting more unilaterally to be able to intervene in places like Bosnia without political consent of France, Great Britain or Germany.

I would disagree with you on that statement. It is only one form of multilateralism transcending into a new form adjusted for the time. The United States certainly could have helped translate the new world order interaction into a new manner of multilateralism.

It’s also very clear that in 1992 and 1993, while people like Mitterrand and John Major maybe took the lead in developing policy toward Bosnia and Herzegovina, if the United States said “listen it’s not working, we need to try something new” it would have been done. They, Major and Mitterrand had no capacity or maybe will, to bring about a solution on their own.  

I would disagree with the notion that we were going from multilateralism to unilateralism. I would say that it was an evolution in multilateral institutions and the most critical one was NATO, the other was the EU.

The one thing I have not addressed is a very complex story of how the flight of the former Yugoslavia, in particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina, accelerated the admission of the new Europe, that is Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the Baltic Sates into NATO, frequently driven by the neo-cons, people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. This also ultimately compelled the EU to say if we don’t admit them into EU than we risk creating a significant distinction between NATO and the EU. There was a time when Mitterrand was in fact trying to marginalize NATO and his failure to bring an end to the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina ultimately marginalized Mitterrand himself. It also marginalized his efforts to diminish the importance of NATO and accelerated the admission of new Europe to NATO and into the EU family.

SA: But in respect to Bosnia there was devotion to such kind of U.S. multilateralism, which actually required “ok” from France and Great Britain in order to start the much-needed intervention. What in fact was hard to get because of France’s pro-Serbian approach.

I wouldn’t say that approach of France was pro-Serbian. I think the French, Mitterrand, simply had his own agenda. Maybe they developed a pro-Serbian perspective out of it because it served their purpose or actually I should say the purpose of Mitterrand. I don’t want to accuse the whole France of what Mitterrand did. There was huge number of political and intellectual forces in France, from the current Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Daniel Con-Bendit to Gescard D’Estaing, who were concerned by Mitterrand’s course. I think that the point you are driving is: how could the United States do this without France and Great Britain. It could. It did it in Iraq in considerably more demanding terms. What the US, we, did in Kuwait did not require U.S. unilateralism but required U.S. leadership.

And once it was seen, that Mitterrand’s policy, Major’s policy, was not working to stop war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then the United States could and should have indicated “what you are doing is not working, people are being murdered, we are creating dangerous precedent, a threat to international peace and security, we now will take the leadership”. But the United States did not take the leadership.

SA: So you blame the United States for its inaction?

Absolutely, but only as one of several who failed both in securing America’s own strategic interests as well as on an international legal and humanitarian basis. The people I blame the least for this whole situation are the Serbs. Why? Simply because under Milosevic’s regime, which was never challenged the way it should have been in terms of its underlying philosophy, it was allowed to cultivate. And this fascist agenda still exists even today. The world says that this was a case of hundreds of years of nationalism and fascisms. However, in most of Western Europe fascism was and is actively confronted while in Serbia it was and still is not confronted.

After the chaos of dissolution of the communist world and the Soviet Union, one should have expected these types of challenges, local leaders appealing to fascism to take the power. But it was not challenged. Now we see other examples where fascism is just underneath the surface, as it continues to be legitimized. I am afraid that the countries which bear the greatest responsibility for tolerating that fascism were the Western democracies. The number one is the US political leadership. Do I hold the United States more accountable than France? It’s not that I hold it more accountable. Certainly, Mitterrand in my opinion has proven himself one of the most regressive forces that we have seen in the last 20, 30 years. The U.S. had a strategic and leadership reason to react more assertively, especially in view of Mitterrand’s not so subtle challenge and use of bigotry to attain his narrow agenda and selective application of international law.  

SA: But let’s take a look at this matter from a little bit different perspective. You have Second World War and the genocide of 6 million Jews. The United States does not act to stop it. Then, the genocide in Cambodia in which the U.S. does not act either. The same thing with the genocide of Kurds in Northern Iraq and genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. But then you have the genocide in Bosnia, where Muslims are being murdered and the U.S. does act. So from that perspective it was a successful leadership, a kind of evolution from the policy of non-involvement to the policy of unprecedented intervention.

Well, the end result in Bosnia is certainly not just and not necessarily very functional. When we talk about Bosnia and Herzegovina, the State Department sometimes now might appear to be the greatest friend of “Republika Serpska”, by further embedding, legitimizing and thus perpetuating the status quo.

The Dayton Accords, when signed, were supposed to be a dynamic process. However, we have not seen a real change, certainly to disassociate Dayton and its sponsors in implementation from the “European Apartheid” that is taking root in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and under the most dangerous conditions. Bosnia and Herzegovina is now built upon the notion of an ethnic divide, which I call the European Apartheid. So let’s not take too much credit for it yet.

As for the Holocaust, I am deeply critical of the failure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Administration to, first, identify what was going on and then not to confront it. I think it is an empty argument to say that too much military resources would have been expended to bomb the railroad lines which were leading to Auschwitz. I’ve seen Auschwitz. It was not buried in a mountain or pretending to be a farm. The Allies knew, certainly if they wanted to know, as well as Auschwitz’s neighbors. We also know that when Jewish refugees starting in late 30’s were looking to flee Germany, were seeking to flee the countries that were already occupied by the Nazis, they were not welcomed anywhere. So of course many of them eventually ended up in Palestine.

And let’s not overlook how Western Allies and Soviet Union reacted to Warsaw Uprising. That not only was a non-intervention, on the part of the Soviet Union it was a calculated to have the Nazis beat the Polish, including Jewish partisans, so the Soviets could subdue the Poles and bring them into the communist block. It was a very conscious act on the part of the Western Allies to accept, validate the Stalinist Soviet domination.

Those were very tough deals made, maybe for expediency and the greater goal of military victory over Germany, but at a huge and probably too high cost. I thought that we learnt something from the World War II. There was and is a high political and moral price for the Allies, the Western world allowed to happen during the Holocaust. And I thought that the world might have also learnt a lesson of betraying its own values as well those who resisted the totalitarianism. Why could I expect that in 1992? Once again, there was no Soviet Union and we did now have a legacy of that very famous phrase “Never again!” and we did have the precedent of Kuwait.

SA: But the phrase “never again” is mainly connected to the Holocaust. It means “never again 6 millions Jews will be killed”. It means Holocaust will never happen again, it does not relate to genocides of different races in different parts of the world. The Holocaust had raised the bar so high that death of tens of thousands doesn’t compare to that at all, doesn’t amount to be understood as genocide.

That’s a point of view, which I would not share. First of all, the group of people in this country, who were most supportive of Bosnia’s case, were Jews. They understood that “never again” meant something much broader than “never again 6 million Jews”. Maybe others did not understand that. Maybe others, as you put it rightfully, thought of genocide only as of a number of 6 million, 9 million or 12 million killed. But this is why we call it the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was genocide, but certainly not all genocides are Holocausts. I am concerned that sometimes people do look at Holocaust and only see it in one perspective. They overlook the millions of others who were exterminated as well alongside the Jews, whether they were Polish, Gypsies, communists or homosexuals. What it tells you is that the Holocaust was not just about Jews, and although it was primarily directed at Jews, it was also directed at everybody else that was different. It tells you that any of us can be a victim of genocide. I’m certain that there were those who thought it was OK to persecute the Jews. After all, in their thinking, the Jews were not the “us.” They felt that they themselves would not become the victims, but then they ended up in the killing camps or the front lines dying for the last breadth of an evil ideology. We all can be victims, either as targets or sacrifices.

And the genocide directed at the Bosnians was not because they were invaders, outsiders. We are Slavic as the Serbs, Croats and the Polish are. We just became a convenient focus of a political regime that sought fear and exclusion to reinvent itself from communism to nationalism, a way to perpetuate its own power.

This is nothing different than the marriage of fascism and socialism under Hitler. Fascism needs an enemy. Communism is similarly susceptible because it is totalitarianism.

You did mention a country before, Rwanda. The question here is very clear. Was the Holocaust in World War II allowed to go much further as it did because it was about Jews? Was the genocide in Bosnia allowed to go because it was about Muslims regardless that they were Slavic? Was it allowed to continue in Rwanda because these were Africans, i.e. “black people”? I am totally convinced through my experience at the United Nations that the further you are from being Christian and the less you are white, the more likely the violations against you, against international law, violations of human rights will be ignored and the genocide will be tolerated.

You see it in Darfur today. It seems to me that the most important point being made about Darfur today is that the perpetrators are Arab Muslims, so the world is very quick to condemn them because they are Muslims. On the other hand the victims are African Muslims, but it seems that because they are Muslims they don’t deserve being saved. Arab Muslims deserve to be condemned, while African Muslims don’t deserve to be saved. I am also condemning the perpetrators of genocide in Darfur, but I am also for saving the victims because again I see that there is another little game being played there. We heard condemnation of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well, but the victims did not benefit unless they were saved including if necessary confronting the perpetrators. Will Darfur’s history be written on the basis of who was helped, saved, or will Darfur serve political rhetoric by “the world” simply verbally condemning the perpetrators?

SA: It seems to me that you view those issues from a racial, ethnical and religious perspective. You name white Christian people being indifferent to what happens to people of other races and religions. In other words, you believe in this clash of civilizations, clash between Christians and Muslims?

I don’t believe in clash of civilizations. It may exist, but it needs to be manufactured and constantly fueled. Let’s be frank, when I speak about the egocentrism of Western Europe or Christian America, I am actually speaking about myself as well. I’m part of this egocentrism. I lived my life here very much as an American or someone who belongs. I don’t see myself somehow separate from this. However, the term “clash of civilizations” seems to legitimize the view that conflict is natural, inevitable and that we are on one side or the other: “With us or against us.” Real civilization means human civilization where each society, culture benefits, learns, contemplates from contact rather than instinctively, by fear and bigotry, reacting to defend or attack what is merely somewhat different.

On a much more global perspective, civilizations or in particular parts of civilizations they tend to fall behind. During Middle Age we have the Muslim world, which came from rather backward area called Arabia and very quickly jumped ahead of the so-termed Christian world. It jumped ahead even in Western Europe in Spain and also in the Middle East. However, it had also adopted, advanced and employed much of what it learned from other civilizations like the Chinese and African, Greek and Roman. Ultimately the so termed Western world jumped ahead of the Muslim world. But we know that what in fact Western civilization gained were the benefits of the interactions with Muslims in Spain, with Ottomans and other segments of Muslim world. Clearly they are different cultural spheres, but rather than clashing, these spheres also benefited from interaction. All seem to benefit, advance on the knowledge which is infusing one into the other. Sometimes it was political knowledge, sometimes scientific, sometimes industrial knowledge etc. We develop not as isolated civilizations, but as a whole global community, but within different segments, sometimes one jumping ahead of the other. There is dynamics involved which indicates much more cooperation and interaction rather than war. Of course we remember the wars because we are taught by our teachers about wars. We are not being taught about when two scientists meet and what happens with that exchange.

SA: However, there is something I don’t understand. Previously you mentioned that the terrorists in London used Bosnia as their rationale to conduct their attacks. On one hand, Islamic extremists use it as their motive to act against the whole West, but on the other hand you have this situation where the U.S. and the West as a whole did not do anything about 6 millions Jews being exterminated but it did a lot when tens of thousands of Muslims were being murdered. The U.S. stopped the genocide directed at Muslims, however it is now being used against it?

Let me make sure it’s clear at this point. Al-Qaeda loves the term: “clash of civilizations”, because their notion is that there should be completely two separate civilizations, where Al-Qaeda rules in one segment. And as far as they are concerned what happens in the rest of the world is, well, not much of their concern. They want to create this notion that there is one set of standards that apply in the Western world and there is another set of standard which applies in the Muslim world. What they would say is: what comes to the Muslim world, we will do what we have to do in Muslim world and that means very conservative, harsh type of Islam. But to understand that, we need to compare 1992 Bosnia and let’s say Israel of 1992. Most Islamic radicals would say that the United States intervention on behalf of Israel in no way could be compared to actions of the United States to help Bosnian Muslims. Certainly the standard of justice, standard of what has been left behind in terms of a state, Israel and Bosnia and Herzegovina can in no way be compared. So that is what Islamic radicals will use as a comparison. Frankly I think that American Jewish community was always aware of this and this is just one more reason why many of them were very supportive of Bosnia’s cause.

Not only American Jews, but all of us who are believers and practitioners of the ideology of an open society, did not wish to give the radicals an opportunity to say that in fact there were two standards on the level of human rights, on the level on international humanitarian law, of democracy and open societies. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina has not left either a good precedent or legacy. The precedent is that what still counts most is expediency rather than either legality or long term strategic considerations. Buy cheap now and pay the price later. Another consequence is the privatization and ultimate devaluation of multilateralism.

The most visible legacy is this new European Apartheid, a return to ethnic or religious ghettoization. Some may wish to ignore by acting as if they do not see it. They may even acknowledge it, but then blame this bad smell on the Bosnians or Balkan history. This has not been part of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s history. Rather, it is the resurrection of something that may have been part of a less brilliant part of European history and now persists as a fever blister on all of the Euro-Atlantic family.

Some might try to convince you and me that this is not a fever blister, but that the Balkans, or Slavs or former Communist states or Muslims are just ugly. Well, we are not ugly and it is a fever blister, in part because the Euro-Atlantic democracies in Dayton chose our mouth to kiss the ugly lips of fascism. Those who want to notice it and remedy it, will do so for the sake of all of us rather than believing that it should be ignored as if it does not exist. I’m certain that those who wish to exploit it for radical propaganda will not ignore it. From my perspective, maybe the biggest peccadillo is in the lost opportunity of Bosnia and Herzegovina being exploited by the global democracies and open societies as a model for the alternative to what the others are peddling, the clash of civilizations, fear, exclusion and ghettoization.

August 18, 2007

Staten Island, New York

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Mr. Muhamed Sacirbey holds B.A. degree in history and J. D. degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. He also holds M.B.A. degree from Columbia University. Prior to becoming Bosnia’s Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the United Nations, he practiced as an attorney in New York City and worked for several years as an investment banker. He presently writes his book “A Convenient Genocide, in a fishbowl ” and is a commentator on human rights and political issues.

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