RECONCILIATION IS LIBERATION

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me first thank the Srebrenica Historical Project for inviting me to this conference.  I accepted because I am in wholehearted agreement with what I understand to be the basic philosophy of the project, namely, that reconciliation is the highest priority among peoples who have been through a terrible war, and that knowledge of history is an essential foundation for reconciliation. Knowledge and sincerity are the two pillars of reconciliation.
So I want to congratulate the Srebrenica Historical Project for undertaking this extremely arduous and necessary task.
The task is particularly difficult and courageous because today, in much if not most of the world, "Srebrenica" is not an event to be studied and put into context but a sacred cult. It must simply be ritually deplored as "genocide" and "the worst massacre since World War II". Anything else is stigmatized as an "insult to the victims" and a form of "revisionism" or "negationism". Now, history involves a constant process of revision. But today what is implied by "revisionism" is "Holocaust denial", which is a crime in a dozen European countries. By analogy with the Holocaust, history of even such recent events as the war in Bosnia is being replaced by "the duty of memory" which means reverent repetition of the designated victims' version of the past.