| Does anyone remember Alex? Alex Langer, of course. He fought his battle for mutual comprehension in ex-Yugoslavia until he died in it. Yet today, it would be good for a lot of us to go back and re-read his words of stringent wisdom. Alex was profoundly convinced of the necessity and the reason of peace. In the newspaper Alto Adige on 30 May 1995, the day after the Tuzla massacre, he referred to the need to use force, where necessary, to guarantee inter-ethnic coexistence. But this should not be an end in itself, nor enlarge the distinctions. Not bombing of the "baddies" (often different sides on different occasions) but an armed presence to provide protection, and to launch the second phase of reconstruction which is not only the physical reconstruction of the territory, but also that of the lacerated tissue of human relations, up to the time when such armed protection become superfluous. Will we be capable of putting this into practice in Kosovo and Serbia? |
