“Every time I come to this sacred place I feel our heavy burden – the burden of fatal aggression against young people who had so many plans and hopes ahead of them, against men in the middle of their lives caring for their families, against the elderly who were summing up their achievements for themselves and for the next generation, against us all, against humankind. And I feel the burden of the international community’s failure to exercise its responsibility to protect those who were under threat of being slaughtered,” High Representative Christian Schmidt said yesterday during the commemoration to victims of Srebrenica genocide.
“Nothing I can say today will ease the pain of those who have lost their husbands, their fathers, their sons, their brothers, and all others. But to be with them and pay respect to those whose remains are buried today is our sacred duty. And what all of us can do is to help prevent such pain from being inflicted again. We should remember the many other places of suffering in Bosnia and Herzegovina and preserve them. We also have to work to make sure there is no vanishing of memory. Those who diminish the places where crimes happened are doing wrong to the memory and the people,” he added.
Schmidt added that we remember those who died violently in every part of this country. We remember each and every victim whose life was extinguished because of hatred, because of fear. Attempts to justify the slaughter of people are attempts to turn the moral compass of the universe on its head.
“Using aggressive violence is never justified. It is with the determination to overcome the hatred that we honour the memory of all those who perished. We do this together. We do this with respect and with humility. Mir s vama. The lesson of what happened in Srebrenica must never be forgotten. It is that the politics of hatred, the politics of resentment, of fear deliver nothing but misery. And we have to work to prevent it from happening, and we have to make the “never, never again” our dedication, not only on 11 July. We have to hand it over to the younger generation that deserves the right to know everything that has happened – not in different curricula but in an open dialogue about how one can prevent this from happening in the future. So that we do not distinguish the younger generation based on different ethnic, gender, or religious backgrounds. I am very happy that the religious authorities are here confirming their conviction that everything has to be dedicated to peace. Selam miru,” HR Schmidt concluded.
