"Sarajevo" a Sarajevo Travel Page by Gottsie

When the West should have been helping the civilians in Bosnia, a Holocaust Memorial Museum was opened in America. Bill Clinton made the following statement.

‘The Holocaust began when the most civilized country of its day unleashed unprecedented acts of cruelty and hatred abetted by perversions of science, philosophy, and law. A culture which produced Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven, then brought forth Hitler and Himmler. The merciless hordes who, themselves, were educated as others who were educated stood by and did nothing. Millions died for who they were, how they worshiped, what they believed, and who they loved. But one people--the Jews--were immutably marked for total destruction. They who were among their nation's most patriotic citizens, whose extinction served no military purpose nor offered any political gain, they who threatened no one were slaughtered by an efficient, unrelenting bureaucracy, dedicated solely to a radical evil with a curiously antiseptic title: The Final Solution.

The Holocaust reminds us forever that knowledge divorced from values can only serve to deepen the human nightmare; that a head without a heart is not humanity.

For those of us here today representing the nations of the West, we must live forever with this knowledge, even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done. Before the war even started, doors to liberty were shut. And even after the United States and the Allies attacked Germany, rail lines to the camps within miles of military significant target were left undisturbed.

………….Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia is but the most brutal and blatant and ever-present manifestation of what we see also with the oppression of the Kurds in Iraq, the abusive treatment of the Baha'i in Iran, the endless race-based violence in South Africa. And in many other places we are reminded again and again how fragile are the safeguards of civilization.

The evil represented in this museum is incontestible. But as we are its witness, so must we remain its adversary in the world in which we live. So we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well. Left unchallenged, they would still prey upon the powerless; and we must not permit that to happen again’

He later went on to open the Srebrenica memorial on September 20, 2003, when he told thousands of relatives of the Srebrenica massacre genocide victims:

"Bad people who lusted for power killed these good people simply because of who they were. They sought power through genocide. But Srebrenica was the beginning of the end of genocide in Europe.... We remember this terrible crime because we dare not forget, because we must pay tribute to the innocent lives, many of them children, snuffed out in what must be called genocidal madness.... I hope the very mention of the name “Srebrenica” will remind every child in the world that pride in our own religious and ethnic heritage does not require or permit us to dehumanize or kill those who are different. I hope and pray that Srebrenica will be for all the world a sober reminder of our common humanity.... May God bless the men and boys of Srebrenica and this sacred land their remains grace."