Today's Date:

Article by Philippe Douste-Blazy, Minister of Foreign Affairs, published in the "Liberation" newspaper

Paris, July 12,2005

On 11 July 1995, Srebrenica fell. Ten years later, the guns have fallen silent in the Balkans and democracy is progressing in that part of Europe which has had such a tumultuous past. A point of contact between the Ottoman and Austrian spheres of influence for long centuries, at the interface between the worlds of Christianity and Islam, the Balkan peninsula is a land of contrasts and mingled influences.

Bosnia is, so to speak, a graphic summary of this history. Ten years have passed since the day the Serbian forces of Bosnia took that enclave placed under the protection of the United Nations. In three days, something like 8,000 Muslim Bosniacs were executed there. Srebrenica was the biggest massacre on our continent since the end of the Second World War. It is a still-open wound in Europe's side, which imposes on us the duty of remembrance and the imperative that we remember.

None of the communities of Bosnia-Herzegovina was spared "ethnic cleansing" and the atrocities committed in its name. But Srebrenica has a special place because of the scale of the violence and planned and methodical character of the crimes committed there. Europe's "founding fathers" built the continent's unity on the memory of the horrors of Nazism. The memory of the Srebrenica massacre also has a role to play in the future and the values of the European Union: peace, reconciliation between the peoples, democratic freedoms and cultural diversity. There is nothing obsolete in this list: the "European dream", for peoples who were once at war, is still today cemented by these common values.

Srebrenica is and will always be symbolic of the international community's impotence and failure to act in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where three years of fighting claimed close to 200,000 lives. That war, born of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, a veritable "backlash" triggered by the disappearance of the regime built by Tito, was fuelled by the international community's hesitations. In 1995, in a determined and politically courageous move, President Chirac managed to convince our partners at last to give themselves the means to take military action. By enabling the lifting of the Sarajevo siege, that intervention opened the way, in a matter of weeks, to political negotiation and the Dayton-Paris Agreement.

So on Monday, 11 July, I felt particularly moved to be representing our country at the commemorative ceremonies organized by the Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities. I also felt a personal emotion. Between 1992 and 1995, I was among those who sought to carry a message of solidarity to the civilian population by accompanying a number of humanitarian missions to the region and on several occasions meeting the courageous President Izetbegovic.

I know that those principally responsible for the tragedy, Mladic and Karadzic, are still on the run. All those who took part in that crime must realize that they will not be allowed to go unpunished. The future cannot be built on ruins and rubble, there can be no shared hope without justice.

This anniversary therefore brings hope for the future of the Balkans. It opens the way for a calmer reading of a past which still refuses to pass. It also marks an important stage on the way to a stronger relationship between those nations, disfigured by the scars of war, and the European Union, today at peace. As the cradle of a European Islam, Bosnia was once a model of cohabitation and peace between faiths. In her contradictions and her conflicts, her history is intimately linked to that of our continent. To help the Balkans move closer to the rest of Europe is to ensure the peace, equilibrium and prosperity of the whole continent. It also means rediscovering that part of ourselves long masked by the convulsions of history.

An important task of remembrance has begun. Recognition of the reality of the Srebrenica massacre, a few months ago, by the Republika Srpska, and the presence at the 11 July 2005 ceremonies of Boris Tadic, the Serbian president, are landmarks in this process of recognition and reconciliation.

In November 2000 at the Zagreb summit, convened on President Chirac's initiative, France and Europe outlined the prospects of a common future for the Balkan countries. More than ever, we must stand by Bosnia-Herzegovina and support the process of reconciliation, consolidate democracy, defend minorities and participate in the project of an ever more united Europe whose wealth is its shared past and whose strength its common future.

At this time of a great debate on the future of Europe's "common home", remembrance is more than ever a compelling duty. If we are to cast Europe in a new mould we must also remember the terrible conflicts of the Balkans and martyrdom of Srebrenica. Our Europe, the Europe of pluralist democracies, of the defenders of human rights and guarantors of cultural diversity, was also built in the killing fields of Srebrenica. The men and women living together in that martyred town share that history made of blood and tears, of violence and barbarism, which scarred the history of Europe in the twentieth century.

We must act to ensure that Europe affirms loud and clear, with the peoples of the Balkans, that another Srebrenica will never again be possible on our continent./.