I thank the Chairman and members of the committee. I do not know if members are a little fed up with people coming here and attempting to establish their Irish credentials because everyone seems to do so. However, despite my accent, birthplace and passport and being a complete ethnic mongrel, I have two Irish grandmothers and part of my business over the coming months in Dublin will be to research and find a home for some extraordinary letters that Desmond FitzGerald senior wrote to my great-aunt. Quite what their relationship was I do not know but towards the end of the time, the letters are written on what must be some of the first letterheads of the Dáil when he was the Minister for Propaganda. The committee might wish to investigate the personal use of Dáil stationery - very personal actually.
More important and more cogently, the trail to the most savage war criminals of the calamity in Bosnia by the name of Lucic began here in Dublin, thanks to a young man who is unable to attend the meeting. This refers to the trail to Lucic by me as a journalist in 1996 and then by The Hague investigators. He is now serving a life sentence for some of the most appalling crimes such as locking families, children and elderly people into their houses and burning them down and also mass slaughter on the bridge at Visegrad. I give thanks for the survival of this extraordinary young man and to the Ireland Action for Bosnia group which helped him out and have indirectly brought me here. I thank the committee for its interest in the subject, which is invaluable. It is also rare and a hallmark of this committee, famously so, among the community of people who follow the calamity and aftermath in Bosnia, the genocide and the killing. This committee did not think that Serbia's ride into the European Union should be a free and unconditional one. Implied in this is that the European Union is not just a map but it is also an idea and it is supposed to stand for something.
I am not a regular in the corridors of politics and power and this is the professional brief I have set myself. I am preceded by my friend, Paddy Ashdown, and I agree with 90% of his views so there is no point in repeating them. I am someone who tends to work more with the powerless and they do not come much more powerless than the survivors and the bereaved of this bloodshed in Bosnia so I thought it might be most helpful if I were able to offer a kind of human rip tide, not so much views but ideas, that will infuse some of the more formal proceedings on which the committee deliberates and which members will encounter on their visit to the region.
It was my curse and honour to uncover the concentration camps in north west Bosnia, including at Omarska. I will speak about that part of the country both per se and as a metaphor for what is happening in so many other parts of the country, especially in the still strife-ridden Drina valley to the east.
The day we uncovered those camps was the day that changed my life. I went in with my colleague from ITN, Penny Marshall. She asked me recently whether we were crazy to allow this event to dominate our lives but I think we would be pretty weird if it did not do so. Not everyone gets the chance to walk into an echo - I use the word carefully and it is authorised by survivors of the Holocaust - of that previous calamity in Europe. This was the worst of its kind since the Holocaust.
Our uncovering of the camps was not the end of the war but rather it was the beginning as it was followed by three long bloody years of people like me going mad as we tried to reveal the mass enforced ethnic cleansing; deportation and mass murder; mass violation of women night after night in camps especially established for that purpose; the torture and siege of Sarajevo. This went on for three years until the general in charge of the United Nations "protection force" so called, in my view, had lunch with Ratko Mladic three days before the latter sent his death squads into Srebrenica.his was allowed to happen because of an appeasement, at best and an encouragement at worst, of the violence, by elements of the diplomatic community. I know what I say is privileged but we will not bother with the names. Most of them were British or French.
We need to examine why that happened, what was guiding this sort of appeasement and-or encouragement of the violence. It was neutrality in a situation where neutrality is not neutral but complicit in the crime. In Ireland, it is best expressed by the neutrality of Britain during the Famine, when the warehouses were full. I cannot put it any better than that and I do not mean to be tendentious. My concern has been - and more so now - that echoes of that same neutrality will pertain in the peace. It is what David Owen called the level playing field, the level killing field between perpetrator and victim, the notion that the different elements in this narrative can be dealt with in the same way. I think this is a very dangerous way to proceed but it is generally done in the cause of what is called reconciliation, time to forget and to move on. I leave that rhetoric to people in other professions than my own. It is my job to be interested not in the post-conflict resolution which is a buzz word and has become quite a lucrative industry for many people but rather in the irresolution in people's lives. Therefore, instead of reconciliation I use the word, "reckoning".
Reckoning is different and it has different meanings for different people. It is a prerequisite to whatever happens in Bosnia, in or out of the European Union. For the perpetrators it is in acts of self-exposure, a coming to terms with what they have done and then coughing up, so to speak. The obvious and extreme example is that Germany has reckoned estimably with what it did and as a result, Jewry, quite rightly, owns the history of what happened. For those people, the survivors and the bereaved, it locates them in history and it allows them to move with time and with their country - Bosnia in this case - to progress and to become a member of the European Union, the international community. There is always the forgotten voice of the dead whose voice, in my view, should be the loudest. It needs to be given a name to be found and to be given back to the living. Much of what the committee will deliberate upon as it contemplates Bosnia and the European Union depends on those things happening. Outside Sarajevo and outside the political discourse and much of the rhetoric, the reckoning is not happening.
Among much of the Bosnian community, there is a type of crazy waltz between justification and denial. It is an oxymoronic stance. On the one hand there are claims that they did not do it and it was all a media conspiracy concocted by ITN and, on the other, they are saying they had to do it because there was going to be jihad in Europe and they were not prepared to have a Slavonic Islamic state. The reality, of course, is that what happened had about as much to do with jihad as I do. Incidentally, there is a more cogent Islamic movement now.
In terms of activity on the ground, there is a group in Prijedor which organises on behalf of the families of the missing and other issues. Members of this organisation have had their windows smashed and their electricity cut off. They are currently being threatened with prosecution if they use the word genocide because that charge has not been proven at The Hague. I could go on. The bottom line is that the perpetrators are not really reckoning with what they have done.
In regard to the plight of survivors, all I can do is talk about individuals. We met a man in the camp who said on film that he did not want to tell any lies but could not tell the truth. I met him in London some eight years later when he told me that if he sleeps for an hour and half at night and his wife touches him, he is back in the camp. Members might remember the famous picture of the man behind barbed wire in 1992. I understand he is not doing too badly. His brother, however, after being okay for 15 years, woke up one morning and started babbling on about the camp and about people being raped and killed. When he did the same thing the next morning he was brought to a mental hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. His Danish psychiatrists are trying to break the hex but have had little success after three years. What has happened with victims like these does not amount to a reckoning for the perpetrators. These people are not seeking to own the history of what happened. If anything, I am here to register their disappearance, if that is not a contradiction in terms.
With regard to the burying of the dead in mass graves, there are primal instincts at play. Since the time we supposedly evolved into homo sapiens, we have buried our dead and built monuments to them. It is what we do. If members get the chance to visit some of these places, they will witness a miracle of science and human rights in the efforts to exhume the graves and reassemble the bodies, including some that were moved to secondary and tertiary graves. The excavators are using DNA testing to identify the remains and return them to the living. It is a remarkable achievement. Efforts are being impeded, however, at both official and institutional level by the Republika Srpska, which is the partitioned Bosnian Serb half of the country. At the vernacular level, which concerns me particularly as a reporter, I am aware that people who know where these mass graves are have had rifle butts smashed across their face and a warning not to assist the investigators seeking to locate the dead. The site of the Omarska camp has been restored to a mines complex, as it was before the war, and is now in the ownership of the ArcelorMittal steel corporation - I must be careful with my privilege here - which is almost the only corporation left in the world of any comparable size. There is no memorial to the dead of Omarska because the company insists that any such memorial must be agreed upon by the local community. I have strong views on this notion that somehow the dead cannot get their monument because the descendants of the people who committed these atrocities do not want them to have one.
These issues matter, even though many of them are not well documented. If the committee is now aware of them, they will not be included in its deliberations. These issues really count on the ground because they tore apart the lives of people who were scattered and shattered throughout the world. Some of them have gone back but many have not. Some return only for the summer months. We are talking about a nation in which only one part of its population is resident in the country itself. Any Irish person will know what I am talking about here. Large numbers of Bosnians live in the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom and indeed in Ireland, driving trucks 24-7 to build the houses that were levelled into the dust of their own stone. In other words, the community that seeks to join the European Union is not limited by the borders of the country itself. One hardly needs to explain that situation to Irish Deputies and Senators.
I realise that committee members will be working to a tight schedule on their visit to Sarajevo. It is fantastic that they are even interested in this and their engagement is more valuable than perhaps they know, because the reality is that most people are not interested. However, Sarajevo is not Bosnia no more than a consideration of Notting Hill Gate would give me an accurate read on youth unemployment in the United Kingdom. I understand that members cannot go everywhere but if any of them, either as individuals or in their capacity as Deputies, are interested in exploring further, I would be delighted to help. In the north west, for example, where the camps were located, the wounds are still raw and very much unresolved. In the east, particularly in the Drina Valley and in locations less famous than Srebrenica, it is still very dangerous for people to return. As I said, I can provide contacts and other assistance to any members who require it.
The question of whether the Republika Srpska can proceed without the Dayton Agreement is irrelevant. That agreement exists but it is important to talk about the difference between partition and devolution. Throughout the war and since, Bosnians have expressed the desire for their country to be like Belgium and Switzerland. The reality, however, it that it simply is not. We are dealing with partition along ethnic lines based on mass murder, mass rape and mass deportation. It is not a case of devolution. The Bosnian Croats fought a pale but unmistakable imitation of what the Bosnian Serbs tried to do during the war and now seek to do the same in peace. The Bosniak polity is not guilt free either. There was a constituency during the war that was quite happy to be a big fish in a small pond and have its own little area of influence. That is still around.
It will be difficult for Europe, Europeans and passionate pro-Europeans - among whom I include myself, as I am sure do the committee members - to walk that high wire between wanting the country to be included while wondering what type of place it is. As Lord Ashdown observed, the partition is firmly cemented at institutional level. The impact on people's everyday lives is sometimes crazy. There is a train, for instance, that travels across the country from the Croatian coast to Zagreb and has to keep changing engines, depending on whether it is in the jurisdiction of the Bosnian Federation railway company, the Republika Srpska railway or the Croatian rail company. Yet all of these people want to be in the European Union. There is an insanity in that. If one buys a postage stamp in Sarajevo and then drives ten minutes past the airport, the stamp is no longer valid even though one has only travelled from one side of the city to the other. This is apparent everywhere. Places have different names and people spray out the one they do not like on the road signs. There are three different mobile telephone codes, reflecting Croat, Muslim and Serb, for want of a better way of putting it. These issues must be addressed.
I am slightly sticking my neck out in raising the next issue, but what is the point of coming here if I do not? It relates to the deportment of the international institutions in Sarajevo. I know this is common to everywhere, but there is a particularly antagonism which is evident in the canteen and at the bus stop, a sort of status stratum whereby it is terribly important that these people behave slightly differently to everybody else. The reality is that the people one tends to see are not necessarily the best policemen or whatever they are in their own country. They go to Bosnia to earn a good salary and live tax free and they often treat very intelligent people who cannot get a job as morons. This is one of those vernacular issues that creates a toxic atmosphere.
There is an issue in regard to passports. A Bosnian Croat is permitted to obtain a Croatian passport and most have done so. So, when Croatia becomes a member of the European Union, although they are Bosnians, they will basically be classed as being Croatian. Bosnian Serbs are not doing it quite so quickly but they will catch on fast when it becomes clear that Serbia is going to become a member of the European Union before Bosnia-Herzegovina, which I think will be pretty disastrous for the latter. We will end up with a group of Bosnians who will not have either passport. As a result, there will be a strange situation whereby some 55% of the population will, as far as their passports state, already be in the European Union, while the remaining 45% will not. If members wish to pursue that matter, I can put them in contact with a woman who works in Mr. Sorensen's office.
What I fear most is that awful sight of members of the international community and diplomats shaking Radovan Karadzic's hand under the chandeliers in Geneva, Paris and London during the war being echoed in the peace. Again, most of them were British and perhaps that is why partition happened because that appears to be their modus operandi everywhere they go. I do not need to talk about that in this country. Other great success stories such as Palestine and Cyprus also involved partition. No doubt, it will also be tried in Iraq before long. Anyway, we will not go there yet. For me, there is an echo such as that to which I refer when the Republika Srpska is regarded almost as a nation state in itself, which is what it wants to be or at least something that accedes to Serbia proper. I cannot bear to see those habits of the war extended into the peace. I will say the same thing, very carefully, about corporate responsibility. Companies that go in and do not allow, for example, for there to be a monument on a particular site, have a responsibility and cannot just threaten, as they do, disinvestment.
It may just be me but it takes people in a country such as Ireland, with its very special history, to roll up their sleeves and deal with some of these difficult issues that are not necessarily contemplated on bits of paper. There are not, shall we say, gorse bushes in the way of accession to the European Union on the part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the other hand, however, we must consider what type of country we want to accede to the Union. It seems right that a country such as Ireland, with its exceptional history, should ensure that there is some kind of sanction on a refusal to deal with these basic issues of reckoning.
I am hugely grateful for the opportunity to address the committee on these matters. I hope that any pessimism on my part will not be taken as disrespect because it is certainly not meant as such. I thank members very much indeed for their time.
