Speech of ECTR Chairman Aleksander Kwaśniewski “European Medal of Tolerance 2012” Brussels, 16th October 2012
Dear President Josipvić, President Tadić, President Schulz, Commissioners, Ambassadors, Members of European Parliament
Ladies and Gentleman, It is my privilege to hold today the Laudation in favor of two extraordinary men – politicians and statesmen - the President of Croatia Ivo Josipović and former President of Serbia Boris Tadić. The European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation has decided a year ago to award them together with the European Medal of Tolerance for all their deeds for reconciliation in the Western Balkans. I am deeply satisfied that today’s ceremony takes place few days after the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the European Union. There could be no better explanation why are we organizing this ceremony here - in The European Parliament. Thank You President Martin Schulz for your agreement to host this event. You offered great understanding and sympathy to our cause.
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Now, I would like to share with You what was behind our Council’s decision to award this Medal to Presidents Ivo Josipović and Boris Tadić.
Ladies and Gentleman, Etymologically, to reconcile means „to bring together again” those who have become separated. But how do you bring together people who had just fought a bloody war in order to make sure that they will be together no longer? You cannot force them to be together, nor should you try. And yet separation need not mean hostility and hatred. Bringing together again must mean, first of all, bringing about a meeting of minds. For minds to meet, however, there must be a common ground. There will be no meeting of minds if we cannot agree about what we see, and what we have seen. Yet this is what is most difficult, after a conflict, for in a conflict parties no longer see the same thing. What is just for one - is oppression to the other. One side’s hero is the other side’s criminal. And even after the war has been waged on the battle-fields, it continues to rage in the minds of men. It seems impossible to give up, even in part, on what one believes is the truth about what had happened. And yet, if there had been only one truth for all, there would not have been a war in the first place. One way of solving this conflict is simply to impose a truth, and prevent by force its being challenged. 2
This happened after WWII in the then Socialist Yugoslavia, in which Tito’s victorious Partisans made sure that instead of a historical and moral accounting for the horrors of the war, everybody will endorse the official doctrine of bratstvo i jedinstvo, brotherhood and unity, to be guarded “like the apple of your eye”. This noble vision made it impossible, however, for those in whose name crimes had been perpetrated to assume responsibility for them, and ask victims forgiveness. And victims, not hearing words of recognition and contrition being credibly said, assumed that the others see nothing to recognize, and nothing to ask forgiveness for. Thus bratstvo i jedinstvo led not to the meeting, but to the closing of minds. And closed minds are the prerequisite for eventually waging open war. This was not what the architects of bratstvo i jedinstvo had wanted. They genuinely believed that their reinterpretation of the past is both an antidote for its repeating itself, and a guarantee of a shining future. On the first point they were right, at least for a time – but they were horribly wrong on the second. More than a hundred thousand of their co-citizens paid with their lives for this error. There can be no more devastating proof that the French philosopher, Albert Camus, was right when he said: “To misname things is to add to the misfortunes of the world”. The men we are honoring today chose a different and much more difficult path. Instead of conjuring reality, trying to make it into 3
something different that it was, in the hope that this phantasm will one day become real, they chose to address reality, calling things by their name. A crime is a crime, and calls for recognition and contrition. Only when those who identify with the victims, and those who identify with the perpetrators, can agree to that, can they hope for their minds to meet. But this agreement cannot be made in the abstract. It has to concern real people, real places, and real dates. This real, not abstract, clod of blood-soaked earth. In Srebrenica. In Križančevo. In Ahmici. In Vukovar. In Paulin Dvor. In Sijekovac. In many more. This task, of recognizing a reality different from what one would have hoped it was, and from what one’s people believe it was, is possibly the hardest task that a statesman has to face. Standing, on July 4, 2001, in the market place of the small Polish town of Jedwabne, I too had to bear its burden. I had to confront a nation split over the very awareness of the horrible crime committed there against the town’s Jewish inhabitants, 60 years earlier, by their Polish neighbors. And I had to confront my own image of the history of my people, which had to be cruelly amended. I still remember the trauma and the pain. The more do I feel admiration for those who, like Presidents Boris Tadić and Ivo Josipović, chose to shoulder this burden when the wounds were still fresh.
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To address not the descendants, but the very perpetrators and victims. Critics of such acts of recognition and contrition first try to deny the facts – yet this is a defense doomed to failure; truth will stand out. So then they will claim that, by recognizing a crime we have committed, we place an undue burden on the people, in whose name, and in whose interest the act was perpetrated. Yet the reverse in fact is true: admission of what happened does not traumatize. It liberates. It makes it possible to differentiate actual perpetrators and those under whose banner the perpetrators acted, and then tried to hide behind it. There are no criminal nations – but criminals have nationalities, and will, like Mafiosi, try to share the crime with all those whose nationality they share. Recognizing the crime, and expressing contrition for it, breaks this pattern of omertå. It liberates the nation from the crimes committed in its name, and makes a reciprocal act of contrition possible. For there is always reciprocity in crime. Not in the sense that in war all are equally guilty: there is a victim and a perpetrator, an aggressor and his prey. Yet crimes will always be committed in war, and those that are perpetrated by victims, if rarer, are in no way morally superior: they are simply often more difficult to admit.
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Your recognition of your crimes makes it more difficult for me to refuse to recognize my own.
Ladies and Gentleman, Indeed, today we recognize the victors. We recognize them not only because that what they did was an all but impossible task. Not only because peace in the Balkans is a vital European interest. Not only because, since the nations of the region have embraced, we no longer need to enforce it. We recognize them because their victories are ours. There would be no European Union without reconciliation. There would be no lasting peace without courage, personal leadership and inspiration stemming from people Josipovic and Tadic’s alike. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union is a symbolic and very timely reference to these European achievements. And yes, of course there is reason to worry – yet there is hope. This hope, incarnated in the words and deeds of Presidents Josipović and Tadić, is a fundamental part of the contribution their countries bring to the construction of a continent at last at peace with itself. As Croatia joins the European Union, and we hope that Serbia will follow suit, it behooves us to recognize the heroes of our times: those who bring about reconciliation. The bringing together again of those, who have been separated!
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Thank You for Your attention.
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