Clinton remembers Srebrenica dead
People who quest for power killed those good people simply because of who they were. They sought power through genocide, but Srebrenica was the beginning of the end to genocide in Europe.
- Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton may be out of office, but he has hardly faded into obscurity, and he can certainly still draw a crowd, and his rhetorical gifts have certainly not rusted from being out of power.
SREBRENICA, Bosnia (CNN) -- Thousands of Bosnians gathered to hear former U.S. President Bill Clinton call for religious tolerance as he unveiled a monument to commemorate the Srebrenica dead.
Clinton was invited to attend by survivors of the massacre for the "personal contribution" they consider he made to end Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.
Clinton was president when an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were massacred in the so-called U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995 after Serbs forces overran the area.
It was the single biggest atrocity of the war and Europe's worst since World War II....
Shortly after the Srebrenica killings, Clinton summoned NATO to launch military attacks to end the war, brokered the Dayton Peace Accord and helped install peacekeepers.
Since then, national and local elections have been established in the region.
Srebrenica was a tiny silver mining Muslim village in Bosnia, before it became the symbol of the bitter war.
Its atrocities spurred NATO into a bombing campaign against Serbian forces besieging other Bosnian towns and villages. Within two months, the war that had lasted four years, was over.
But Bosnia is still trying to account for all its dead. Mass graves are still being found and exhumed eight years after the war ended. According to the Red Cross, about 200,000 people were killed during the war. Just this week about 500 bodies were pulled from this the latest and largest mass grave discovered so far.
Bosnia's wounds may not heal in our lifetimes, and indeed they may forever remain an open wound. My experience in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated just how deeply engrained ethnically-based animosity can run. I suppose the best we can hope for is that the children of the victims will look to take a different path. If history provides any lessons, however, we should not be so quick to assume the best. Evil runs deep in the Balkans, and bloodshed is a time-honored tradition. Don't expect that to change anytime soon.
