At today’s session of the Parliament of the Council of Europe, the representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina in this body, Sabina Ćudić, spoke about the suffering of Palestinian children in Israel’s war against Hamas.
The topic of today’s session of the Parliament of the Council of Europe was: “Response to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and preventing further escalations in the Middle East after the recent Iranian attack on Israel”.
Below you can read her presentation at this European institution.
“Dear colleagues, I have a question for you. Some of you are old enough to have been politically active decades ago. Some of you remember the nineties. And my question is, do you remember where you were in the summer of 1992? Some of Maybe you got married, some got involved in politics, graduated… Or where were you in the summer of 1993, 1994, 1995?”, said Ćudić.
She said that in the summer of 1995 she was in Sarajevo, watching her school friends being killed in the most brutal ways possible.
“And naive as a child can be, I wondered where you were and hoped you were coming to save us. And maybe in 10 or 20 years a Palestinian child will be standing here asking us where we were in the spring of 2024. Uncomfortable it is true that the atrocities we ignore tend to come back to haunt us, the same way we will be forever haunted by our failure to prevent the holocaust on this continent. will the promise of ‘never again’ turn into a hypocritical repetition after newly committed crimes,” said Ćudić.
She pointed out that it took her time to read the biographies and poignant testimonies of the families of the Israeli hostages and that she learned as much as could be learned.
“I wondered if you did the same to learn about the fate of the thousands of murdered Gaza children and their families. And here’s why you didn’t. Because you couldn’t. Because if you did, and if we just read their names, we’d stay here for days. So the idea of balanced reporting is disgusting to me, because it is not acceptable and killing unarmed children is not self-defense,” said Ćudić.
She went on to say that it was unacceptable for her to observe these two things together.
“After we have silenced activists in various member countries, who is next? The thousands of incredibly brave Jewish intellectuals and activists who are speaking out for a ceasefire? Some of your countries are persecuting these people and stripping them of their awards for speaking out against the war. Why don’t we have today brave European or world leaders? This is because we have chosen in the past decades and we continue to choose political superficiality and calculations instead of leading and inspiring people with the truth. And I repeat, that will come back to haunt us,” Ćudić concluded in the Council’s presentation of Europe, Klix.ba reports.
