Source Q

Slobodan Milosevic, speech delivered at Gazimestan, Kosovo, 28 June 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo.

Six centuries ago, Serbia defended itself on the Field of Kosovo. Today, six centuries later, we are again engaged in battles. They are not armed battles, though such things are not yet excluded. But regardless of what kind of battles they may be, they cannot be won without resolve, courage and sacrifice. Whoever has betrayed Kosovo has betrayed Serbia. Kosovo is the heart of Serbia. It is the place where our history, our culture and our identity were born. No force and no authority can take it from us. The Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija have been leaving their homeland under pressure from Albanian nationalists. This is not just a Serbian national problem. It is a problem that threatens all of Yugoslavia.

Source R

Western editorial cartoon published in 1998, showing a large hand labelled "Belgrade" squeezing a small map outline of Kosovo. Tiny figures representing Kosovo Albanians are being pushed out of the borders. A cracked Yugoslav flag hangs in the background.

Source S

Ibrahim Rugova, President of the self-declared Republic of Kosovo, interview with the New York Times, March 1998.

For nearly a decade we have pursued a policy of nonviolent resistance. We have built our own institutions: schools, hospitals, a parallel government. We have asked only for what is our right under international law: self-determination. Belgrade responds with repression. Our language has been banned from official use. Our university has been closed. Our elected assembly has been dissolved. Serbian police patrol our streets as an occupying force. We have been patient, but patience has limits. The international community speaks of human rights and the rule of law, yet it does nothing while two million people are denied their most basic freedoms. If the world does not act, others will act in our place, and the consequences will be far worse than anything we have seen so far.

Source T

Historian Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, published 1998.

The roots of the Kosovo conflict lay in the deliberate dismantling of Kosovo's autonomy by Slobodan Milosevic between 1989 and 1990. Under the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, Kosovo had enjoyed substantial autonomy as a province within Serbia, with its own assembly, judiciary, and police force. Milosevic revoked this autonomy through a series of constitutional amendments imposed under military pressure, stripping Kosovo's Albanian majority of political representation and replacing Albanian officials, teachers, and police with Serbs. The effect was to reduce a population that was approximately 90% Albanian to the status of a subject people in their own territory. The parallel state built by Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo sustained Albanian civic life through the 1990s, but its policy of nonviolent resistance was increasingly challenged by younger Albanians who saw armed struggle as the only remaining option.

Source Q

Scott Straus, a professor of political science, interviewing a former supporter of Hutu extremists who had also confessed to killing civilians, in the collection of accounts Intimate Enemy. Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (2006).

[President] Habyarimana was the parent of Rwanda. Habyarimana did nothing bad to Tutsis … No person in Rwanda thought "I am Hutu. You are Tutsi." Habyarimana prevented all that. We intermarried. All that was disturbed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) war … We, the peasants, believed that the person who had killed the president was an enemy … they were Tutsis, so we believed the solution was to kill the Tutsi… We said we were defending ourselves against the enemy… All the things that happened in Rwanda were caused by the war between the RPF and the Rwandan government, and the people who are dead and the things that were destroyed, it was the RPF and the government in place that must answer for that.

Source R Photograph of Rwandan government soldiers atop a tank fleeing with civilians from advancing RPF forces (17 July 1994).

Source S

Linda Melvern, a British journalist, writing in the book Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (2004).

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Commander Dallaire met the Rwandan government, hoping to obtain permission to evacuate refugees in Kigali, [but] the government did not seem to be concerned by the horrendous ethnic killing. On 23 April, Dallaire travelled to see the RPF leader Kagame … The RPF was disappointed that the "international community" had not stated its disgust with the violent destruction of the opposition political parties and the total survival of the government and its leaders. Dallaire and Colonel Bagosora [Hutu extremist leader] then met on 28 April … Bagosora told Dallaire that the RPF was intending to conquer the whole country. His side had never refused to share power with the RPF. It was all the fault of the RPF for refusing to negotiate with the government … The swift military success of the RPF in the country created an atmosphere of fear among the [government's] army … Some officers were planning to massacre all the people in Kigali who were sheltering in hotels and churches, the vast majority of them Tutsi … On 28 April, Oxfam [an international charity] issued a press release stating that the pattern of systematic killing of the Tutsi amounted to genocide … But another story now dominated the headlines: with thousands of people from eastern Rwanda fleeing the RPF advance, this was the fastest exodus [mass movement] of people the world had seen.

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André Guichaoua, a professor of sociology, writing in the academic book From War to Genocide. Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990-1994 (2017).

[Even the] Rwandan government's … most eager defenders doubted that the war against the RPF could be won … If defeat at the hands of the RPF could not be avoided, none of [the] Tutsi … should be left to profit from their victory … Their primary objective was to exterminate the potential political base for the RPF and its allies … From 12 April onward, government politicians linked their political futures to a conclusion of the war through genocide and the elimination of Tutsi … For its part, the RPF's repeated refusals to negotiate fell in line with the government's murderous strategy. When the RPF finally agreed to engage in discussions between 22 April and 14 May 1994, it refused to negotiate with the government's representative. But there was no longer anything for the two sides to negotiate, the RPF did not want to hear anything more about a ceasefire. This is exactly what Dallaire confirmed in his message to the UN on 24 April, which summarized his conversation with Paul Kagame: "He did not appear interested in a ceasefire. His forces were winning the war and were going to continue fighting as long as they were winning."

Source Q

A speech by Josip Broz Tito made on 29 November 1943 in Belgrade.

We are very well aware that the traitor government is doing all it can to smuggle itself back into Yugoslavia at any cost (and that goes for the king too) before the people utter their decisive word on their future. We know that certain reactionary circles abroad are helping that government. But we also know that the vast majority of progressive democratic elements in the Allied countries sincerely desire our people to decide their future for themselves … We have been slandered from all sides … All the occupiers and traitors … say that our people's liberation struggle in Yugoslavia is purely a communist affair, involving the bolshevization of a country, an attempt by the communists to seize power, the abolition of private property, the destruction of the church and of religion, the destruction of culture and so on … Very few people believe these lies any longer, and least of all the people of Yugoslavia … The times are past when a handful of reactionaries could ascribe such matters to the communists of Yugoslavia, in order to isolate them from the people. Bearing this in mind … It is essential to take steps to ensure that our peoples obtain a state system based on the brotherhood and equality of rights of all peoples of Yugoslavia and which would guarantee genuine liberty and democracy to all sections of the community. The monarchy has completely discredited itself in the eyes of the people during the last twenty-three years. The evidence for this has been proved hundreds of thousands of times and all our peoples know it. Only a republican form of government can ensure that such disasters never again come upon our people.

Source R

A speech by Josip Broz Tito made on 14 February 1945 in Belgrade.

Our sacrifices are terrible. I can safely say that there is no other part of the world which has been devastated on a vaster scale than Yugoslavia. Every tenth Yugoslav has perished in this struggle in which we were forced to wrest armaments from our enemies, to freeze without clothing, and to die without medication. Nevertheless our optimism and faith have proved justified. The greatest gain of this conflict between democracy and fascism lies in the fact that it has drawn together everything that was good in humanity. The unity of the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain is the best guarantee to the peoples of the world that Nazi horrors will never again be repeated. In organizing our country on the sacred principles of democracy and of concern for the common man, we Yugoslavs believe that we are making our best contribution to this harmonious community.

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A speech by Josip Broz Tito made on 9 May 1945 in Belgrade.

Peoples of Yugoslavia! Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Moslems! The long-desired day has dawned which you have been waiting for with such yearning. The day of rejoicing has come to us here, too. Finally the greatest fascist power in Europe is vanquished, Germany, which incited so much suffering upon our people and took so many victims. The powers that tried to enslave you have been vanquished. You were offered enticements by the German and Italian fascists in order to lead you to exterminate each other. But your best sons and daughters, inspired with love for their homeland and for you, her peoples, thwarted this diabolical enemy plan. Instead of mutual dissension and hostility, you are today united in a new and happier Yugoslavia. Instead of the old Yugoslavia, rotten with corruption and injustice, today we have the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia of equal peoples. This is the result of the victory of our glorious Yugoslav Army, it is the result of your endurance, your self-sacrifice and faith in your just cause … We must make our brotherhood and unity even stronger, so that never again can any force destroy it.

Source T

Extract from Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (2008).

Tito's wartime speeches were carefully crafted to appeal to multiple audiences at once. While denouncing the monarchy and advocating for a federal republic, he deliberately avoided mentioning communism as the guiding ideology, instead emphasizing brotherhood, equality, and democratic principles. This rhetorical strategy served to broaden support beyond committed communists, reassuring Western Allies while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a post-war communist state. The language of national unity masked what was, in practice, a communist-led movement with clear revolutionary aims.

Source Q

P. Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998).

In the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there's a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian military officers. We were in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the centre of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least fty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the oor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with ies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them (the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes) and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn't need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. … at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it? … The killers were killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big res, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer … Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could and beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that.

Source R

Photograph of the corpses of Tutsi that litter the floor of a classroom at Nyarabuyu church, Rwanda, 1994.

Source S

"Heart of Rwanda's Darkness: Slaughter at a rural church", an article by Donatella Lorch, published in The New York Times on 3 June 1994.

The banner across the entrance to the red brick church here announces the celebration of a festival. A poster of Pope John Paul II is tacked on the main door and above it is a large white statue of Jesus, his arms beckoning. Inside are the remains of victims of a mass slaughter carried out by Government-trained militiamen in mid-April. In what they had hoped would be a refuge from the deadly irrationality of tribal and political violence, more than 500 members of the Tutsi tribe found their way to the church compound only to be shot or hacked to death by Hutu soldiers in classrooms, bathrooms and courtyards, and then left to rot. It appears that they were methodically hunted down,first in the church, then in the school and nally in the workshops near the soccer field. Residents say that probably 1,000 more were killed and buried in mass graves in the town, which is just inside the border with Tanzania. A frenzy of killing was evident at the rear of the compound. There, eight rooms are led with hundreds of corpses, shoulder to shoulder, and piled onto one another. One hundred more killed in a courtyard are now half skeletons, their esh in shreds. There are so many that it is impossible to walk through without treading on them. More corpses are hidden in the tall grass. "It took them two days to kill everyone in the church," said Consolata Mukatwagirimana, 27, a Tutsi whose family was killed at home and who like the rest of the townspeople has been led to a camp 50 miles away. She accompanied reporters to the church. This village, now under control of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel group led by the minority Tutsi tribe, appears typical of many devastated by regular Army troops or militiamen of the majority Hutu tribe in the early days of the two-month old civil war. The buildings are empty, the livestock is gone. Only corpses and the sound of the wind remain.

Source T

Flora Mukampore, a survivor from the massacre at Nyarubuye recalls what happened to her. She knew one of the killers personally.

Gitera was there. Imagine someone leaving their home and knowing their victim, knowing their names and the names of their 88 1 children. They all went there and killed their neighbours, their wives and their children. All the people they were cutting fell on me because I was near the door. My hair was all washed with blood. My body was drenched in blood and it was starting to dry on me, so the killers thought I'd been cut all over, they thought I was dead. I lay down on one side with only one eye open. I could hear a man come towards me and I guess he saw me breathe. He hit me on my head saying: "Is this thing still alive?" Immediately I heard my entire body say "whaaagh". Something in my head changed forever. Everything stopped. When the wind blew and the cold passed through my body I woke up and went into the building but I didn't realise that there were bodies around me. I didn't remember what had happened. I just thought they were normal people and so I just slept among them like we had slept together before the killers came. Can you imagine living with the dead. At some point god helped me and made me unconscious because if I hadn't been, I think I would have killed myself. But I was unconscious, and anyway killing yourself needs energy.

Source Q

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, address to the UN General Assembly, 20 September 1999, following the NATO intervention in Kosovo.

The tragedy of Kosovo has left us all with a sense of deep disquiet. We are all deeply aware of the horror that unfolded there: the systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, the mass deportation of nearly one million people, the destruction of homes, the massacres of civilians. The international community was faced with a terrible dilemma. On one hand, the Charter of the United Nations clearly forbids the use of force against a sovereign state without Security Council authorisation. On the other hand, the failure to act in Rwanda five years earlier haunted us all. Can we really afford to let the same thing happen again? The Kosovo intervention has forced us to confront a fundamental question: when does the international community's responsibility to protect innocent civilians override the principle of state sovereignty?

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Photograph taken on the Kosovo-Macedonia border, April 1999, showing a long column of refugees walking along a road carrying bundles and suitcases. Abandoned houses are visible behind them and a NATO aircraft flies overhead. A road sign reads "Macedonia Border."

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Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, statement to the UN Security Council, 24 March 1999, condemning the NATO bombing campaign.

The actions of NATO constitute a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and of international law. No state, and no group of states, has the right to use military force against a sovereign state without the authorisation of the Security Council. The humanitarian situation in Kosovo, however grave, does not justify the unilateral use of force by a military alliance acting outside the framework of international law. Russia did not and does not support Serbian policy in Kosovo. But we cannot accept a precedent in which military alliances bypass the Security Council and impose their will by force. If this principle is established, no small nation will be safe from intervention by powerful states acting in the name of "humanitarianism."

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Historian Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, second edition, 2002.

The impact of the Kosovo war extended far beyond the Balkans. It established a precedent for humanitarian military intervention without UN Security Council authorisation that would reshape international relations for decades. The concept of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), formally adopted by the UN in 2005, was a direct intellectual product of the Kosovo debate. Within Kosovo itself, the consequences were profound but ambiguous: the NATO campaign succeeded in ending Serbian ethnic cleansing and enabling the return of most refugees, but it also triggered a reverse wave of violence against the Serbian and Roma minorities who remained. Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, recognised by the United States and most Western European states but rejected by Serbia and Russia. The territory remained effectively partitioned and internationally disputed, a reminder that military intervention can end a crisis without resolving the underlying conflict.