I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for
advertising in front of the newspaper office.
Buttons–red and yellow buttons–blue and black buttons–
are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one
inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in
a red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling
death in their throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
to us?

But I must take exception to the sentence: The U.S. and its European allies – who had declared the town a U.N. protected “safe area” – stood by as the Serbs rampaged for days in the summer of 1995.

The United States was NOT there in the summer of 1995. The Dayton talks did not conclude until November, and the 3rd Infantry “Brave Rifles” did not enter the area until early December, 1995. This sentence implicates the United States in a terrible atrocity, but it’s the United NATIONS, not the United States, that allowed this to happen.

Completely agree, otherwise ethnically cleansed 300.000 serbs from Croatia in 1995 should crate majority in e.g. city hall of Knin. What would Croats say about that kind of democracy?

Recently, ruling politicians around the region are doing good job in reconciliation, main decision-makers of this insanities have been jailed and prosecuted, whatsoever, Balkan history has thought people living here that Serbs are worst enemies to Croats and vice verso, whilst Bosnian muslims (people with similar roots, with other religion) were perceived as an enemies of both.

My opinion is that economic prosperity, and only social welfare, in this neglected region could, slowly but surely, erase these inherited thoughts. Unfortunately, all countries around the region have been hit by the world financial crisis, and in such a times extremists are on tide.

Equally disgusting is the extreme nationalist ideology of Ahmadinejad’s people in Iran, who claim that either the holocaust never happened or that it was much smaller than claimed… And further, claim that the West has somehow invented this history in order to make the Arabs suffer.
The rhetoric needs to be shown for what it really is. It’s an attack on humanity. “Islamic” clerics who were widely respected in their communities at the time helped fan the flames of anti-semitism into genocide, persecution and xenophobia. Their intransigence toward Jewish immigration helped to create the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews. That’s history. Go and look it up if you want. And now, that’s what Ahmadinejad is saying didn’t happen. The people – or, perhaps millions of them – never existed – according to Ahmadinejad.

The Jews who were slaughtered in Europe during WWII… When since then, have they voted?
Should we discriminate against the grandchildren of modern non-Jewish Germans by giving disproportionately favourable voting powers to Jews there now? Ten votes per voter? We cannot do that. They have been lost to us, forever; so far as we can see. All we can do, is vigorously but gently try to repair the wrongs, and not create new wrongs at the same time. Punish those criminally liable, and spare the innocents further inequality…

Should genocide be seen to be rewarded, in that the children of the guilty should be allowed to overrun the children of the victims? Or should we punish the innocent children of the guilty parties? It is a paradox, based on what we know at this juncture.

No matter what your position on this question, we can probably agree that the most important first step is to EXPOSE the guilt. PROTECT those exposing the guilt. PUNISH those working against the exposure of the guilt. And EDUCATE the children of the guilty, on the crimes of their forefathers which they must never repeat, on pains of suffering the same punishments that will readily be meted out to the perpetrators of such crimes in the future…

We need to use forensic technology to its full potential, in gathering the evidence necessary to support this process of at least partial healing.