DASHNAKTSUTIUN AND PRESIDENT HAVE DIFFERENT INTERESTS
Lragir.am
02 June 06
The collapse of the coalition will continue, and this time
Dashnaktsutiun will be to blame. On June 2 Haik Babukhanyan,
Constitutional Right Union, made such a forecast at the Hayeli
Club. According to him, Dashnaktsutiun replaces the Country of Law
(Orinats Yerkir Party) in the coalition in the sense that being in the
government, it acts as opposition.
`As you can see, recently Dashnaktsutiun has been making obviously
oppositionist statements. Simply it is surprising that, on the one
hand, Dashnaktsutiun takes up some posts that were formerly occupied
by the Country of Law and, on the other hand, attempts at adopting the
same strategy, in other words, opposition inside the government,’ says
Haik Babukhanyan. According to him, the controversies between
Dashnaktsutiun and the Republican will become deeper as the
parliamentary election is coming up.
`The collapse of the coalition will go on. In the meantime, new
controversies will occur between Dashnaktsutiun and the core of the
coalition. Everyone today is anxious to know what the rules of the
game will be during the election and after the election. People have
somehow settled down, built anest, and now they have to think what is
going to happen during and after the election, ‘ says Haik
Babukhanyan. However, the controversies between Dashnaktsutiun and
the Republican, which seem likely to grow, do not mean that
disagreement between the president and the Republican is becoming
deeper too. Haik Babukhanyan says Dashnaktsutiun and the president
cannot be identified because they pursue different interests.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ELECTED CHAIRS OF COMMITTEES

Lragir.am
02 June 06

On June 2, 72 members of parliament filled in the posts of chairs of
two standing committees, vacant since the resignation of the Country
of Law Party (Orinats Yerkir). 71 members of parliament voted for
Mnatsakan Petrosyan, United Labor Party, the only candidate for the
post of chair of the Social, Health and Environment Committee. One
member of parliament voted against this candidate. 70 members of
parliament voted for Aramayis Grigoryan, ARF, the only candidate for
the post of chair of the Committee of National Security, Internal
Affairs and Defense. One member of parliament was against.
The vacant positions are now occupied. And Victor Dallakyan says the
situation reminds the years of Brezhnev, when everything was stagnant
and everything was predictable.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Panorama.am
13:47 02/06/06

ORINATS YERKIR FORMS A BROTHERHOOD WITH CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT UNION
Orinats Yerkir (OY) and Constitutional Right Union (CRU) will
cooperate at the doors of parliamentary elections, CRU member Haik
BABUKHANYAN told a press conference today. `In the past OY tried to
point out mistakes and unveil illegalities, but they were partly its
fault,’ Babukhanyan said.
For CRU the important thing is that OY is not in the ruling coalition
any more and CRU welcomes OY in the opposition. `They have come to the
awareness that this authorities are an evil for people and it is not
possible to change anything from inside,’ Babukhanyan said. During the
meeting with Artur Baghdasaryan, the two parties have decided to
discuss cooperation between the two in September./Panorama.am/

ISN, Switzerland
June 3 2006
The self-determination snowball

BBC
By Simon Saradzhyan in Moscow for ISN Security Watch (02/06/06)
After years of paying lip service to the territorial integrity of
Georgia and Moldova, Russia has moved to side with the separatist
regimes on the territories of these two newly independent states in
an apparent effort to pre-empt an increase in Western alliances’
influence in a region that Moscow views as a zone of its strategic,
if not exclusive interests.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry signaled the rhetorical shift on Thursday
with two senior diplomats publicly touting the idea that Moscow may
recognize the right of South Ossetia and Transdniester to secede from
Georgia and Moldova, respectively.
“The expression of will of the people is the highest instance for
determining the fate of those who live on a concrete territory,”
Ambassador Valery Nesterushkin, the Foreign Ministry’s special envoy,
said. “This is at least how a referendum is perceived through [the
prism of] international law.”
Officially, Nesterushkin was commenting on a statement by the head of
the self-styled Transdniestrian Republic, Igor Smirnov, who announced
earlier on Thursday that this separatist province in Moldova may hold
a referendum on independence by September.
In reality, Nesterushkin was also firing back at Belgian Foreign
Minister Karel De Gucht, who is also the chairman of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Gucht called on
Thursday for Russia to withdraw its 1,200 soldiers from this province
of 400,000 so that an international peacekeeping force could be
installed there. He even offered 10 million (US$13 million) out of
the OSCE budget to finance the withdrawal of those troops, which have
remained there since the separation of Moldova and Transdniester
after the two sides went to war in 1992, according to Russia’s
Kommersant daily newspaper.
“It is important to start discussions on transforming the
peacekeeping operation in Moldova into an internationally mandated,
recognized operation that could enhance security and stability for
both [Trans]Dnestr and Moldova,” De Gucht told a news conference in
Tiraspol, Transdniester’s capital.
And the Moldovan side has repeatedly accused Russia of supporting the
separatists to keep the conflict unresolved so that Russia can
maintain leverage on both sides and preserve its influence in the
region. Moldova has been trying to exit the zone of Russia’s
influence. Initially elected on a pro-Russian platform, Moldova’s
incumbent president Vladimir Voronin has been actively trying to
anchor this tiny republic to the EU and get the Western powers
involved in mediation of the conflict.
Voronin’s tactics resemble those of Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili. This US-educated lawyer has also been trying to win
Western mediation of Georgia’s conflicts with separatist Abkhazia and
South Ossetia, while criticizing Russia’s conduct as a mediator and
peacekeeper.
On Wednesday, the Georgian government fired yet another critical
salvo over what it deemed as the illegal entry of Russian
peacekeepers into Georgian territory because the servicemen failed to
obtain Georgian visas. Some 500 Russian soldiers were deployed to
South Ossetia from Russia as part of personnel rotation of the
peacekeeping operation there.
Given lack of visas, “this operation is no longer peacekeeping, but
rather an operation of force conducted by the Russian military”,
Georgia’s Conflict Resolution Minister Georgi Khaindrava told
journalists in Tbilisi Thursday.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry blistered at the accusations, noting that
Georgia did not control the territory of South Ossetia and hinting
that South Ossetia’s aspirations to secede from Georgia may be viewed
as legitimate by Russia.
“We treat the principle of territorial integrity with respect. So far
as Georgia is concerned, however, its territorial integrity is rather
a possibility, than the present-day political and legal reality,” the
ministry’s chief spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said in a Thursday
statement.
“It could become a reality only as a result of difficult talks, in
which the stand of South Ossetia will be based, as we understand it,
on another principle, which is equally recognized by the world
community – the right to self-determination,” the statement said.
While commenting on the right of self-determination of South Ossetia
and Transdniester, Russian diplomats have remained silent on whether
the separatist republics of Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh should have
the same right. However, Russia may introduce a resolution to the UN
Security Council, which would make no reference to Georgia’s
territorial integrity and allow for the possibility of Abkhazia’
secession, the Friday issue of Kommersant quoted an unnamed source in
the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying.
Previously, the official position of Russia, which has been involved
in mediation of both conflicts and has peacekeepers stationed there,
has been that it respects the territorial integrity of both Georgia
and Moldova, but stands for the peaceful resolution of both conflicts
on the basis of mutual compromises. In reality, Russia offered not so
tacit support for Transdniester, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia by
granting Russian citizenship to tens of thousands of residents in the
separatist provinces. Yet Russian diplomats still pay lip service to
the idea of territorial integrity. With the conflicts frozen and
unresolved, Russia can count on maintaining its leverage over all the
stakeholders.
But that “frozen” strategy has been increasingly undermined as the
new governments of Georgia and Moldova seek to anchor themselves to
the West and the latter reciprocates by boosting its support for the
two governments vis-à-vis the separatist regimes.
Sensing the increasing pressure, both Russia and the separatist
regimes are digging their heels in. The efforts of the separatists to
legitimize their cause may see a major boost from the pending
referendum on Kosovo’s independence, as well as a recent referendum
in Montenegro in which voters chose to split from the state union
with Serbia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the debate on the issue in
Russia and neighboring states by pointing out at a press conference
in late January that Kosovo’s independence would bolster similar bids
by de facto independent republics in the former Soviet Union. He
returned to the issue of self-determination referendums on Friday by
citing the 21 May plebiscite in Montenegro.
“Such precedents would negatively affect the situation not only in
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose people would ask why the Albanians
in Kosovo could separate from a state they are part of, while they
cannot,” Putin told a meeting of foreign editors and reporters
outside Moscow.
While Russian diplomats’ reference to the right of self-determination
may signal a rhetoric shift, it is unlikely that Moscow would
recognize the independence of either separatist provinces anytime
soon, according to Aleksei Malashenko, senior expert with the
Carnegie Moscow Center, and Nikolai Silaev, a senior expert with the
Center for Caucasus Studies at the Moscow State University of Foreign
Relations.
In separate telephone interviews with ISN Security Watch on Thursday,
both said Russia was interested in keeping the conflicts on the
territory of former Soviet Union frozen, with Malashenko noting that
Moscow would hardly alter its position anytime before 2008
presidential elections.
Arthur Martirosyan, a senior program manager with the Cambridge,
MA-based Conflict Management Group, agreed.
“I do not see this as a major shift in the Russian policy, as Russia
has been consistently using these conflicts as a persuasion tool
trying to get Georgia and Moldova and less so Azerbaijan take a less
pro-Western and a more pro-Russian foreign policy stance,” he said.
Russia is likely to stick to no recognition for as long as there is
none for Kosovo, according to Martirosyan. However, since Kosovo’s
conditional independence is inevitable, the real question is about
the timing of Russia’s symmetric responses in conflicts in Georgia
and Moldova, he said in a Friday telephone interview.
However, according to Konstantin Zatulin, State Duma deputy and head
of the hard-line Institute of Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS) in Moscow, the statements by Foreign Ministry officials do
imply that Russia will recognize the separatist republics if their
populations vote to secede.
“It is very a correct and timely statement, especially after the
referendum in Montenegro. We need to respect opinion of people who
want self-determination,” he said.
Zatulin was echoed by Vadim Gustov, chairman of the Federation
Council’s CIS committee. Gustov told Kommersant on Thursday that
Russia had every right to accept the separatist provinces if they
voted to join the Russian Federation.
In addition to these federal legislators, Gennady Bukaev, assistant
to Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, claimed at a joint session of
government of South Ossetia and Russia’s North Ossetia in April that
the federal government had made a principle decision to incorporate
the former.
The two republics will then be united into one subject of the Russian
Federation, “the name of which is already known to the world –
Alania”, two Russian dailies quoted Bukaev as saying. The Russian
Foreign Ministry later sought to downplay this statement in what
demonstrates that Russia has no plans to absorb either territory,
according to independent experts.
Simon Saradzhyan is a veteran security and defense writer based in
Moscow, Russia. He is a co-founder of the Eurasian Security Studies
Center in Moscow.
m?id=16087

Azerbaijan News Service
June 2 2006
EUROPEAN UNION SUPPORT THE ACTIVITY OF MINSK GROUP, OSCE IN SOLUTION
OF DAQLIQ QARABAQ CONFLICT
2006-06-02 17:49
European Union support the activity of Minsk Group, OSCE in solution
of Daqliq Qarabaq conflict, Giuseppe Buzini, the responsible
representative of new neighbor policy of EU on relations with
Azerbaijan. According to Mr. Buzzini the solution of Daqliq Qarabaq
problem is not dependent on functionaries of new neighbor policy
program. OSCE’s Minsk group including France, member of European
Union, co-chairman of establishment, has been working on the solution
of the problem for a long time. So EU has indirect connections with
the issue. Alongside, Mr.Buzzini stated that EU is ready to
contribute in rehabilitation of the region as well as infrastructure,
transportation. Andreas Herdina, EU New Neighborhood Policy Sectors
Coordinator, said to APA that settlements of conflicts in South
Caucasus including Daqliq Qarabaq is very significant for EU. We
witness positive steps as Rambouiet talks and planned meeting in
Bucharest.

Azerbaijan News Service
June 2 2006
DAQLIQ QARABAQ PROBLEM TO BE DISCUSSED AT THE SESSION OF OSCE
PARLIAMENT ASSEMBLY ON JUNE 3
2006-06-02 10:26
Daqliq Qarabaq problem will be discussed at spring session of OSCE
Parliament Assembly on June 3 if several parliamentarians give their
consent on this issue. According to Eldar Ibrahimov Turkey, Georgia,
Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Central Asia states will support
Azerbaijan’s initiative. Azerbaijan will be represented by Bahar
Muaradova, head of Azerbaijani delegation at OSCE Parliament Assembly
and deputy speaker of Milli Majlis.

A1+
ELECTIONS BY THE BREZHNEV STYLE
[04:55 pm] 02 June, 2006
«It feels like not the year 2006 but 1976, the times of Brezhnev when
the elections were held with one candidate only», announced Viktor
Dallakyan, secretary of the Justice faction after the candidacies for
the posts of the heads of Committees were put forward.
Before that, as it was expected the, ARF faction put forward the
candidacy of Aramayis Grigoryan as head of the Standing Committee on
Defence, National Security and Internal Affairs. Grigoryan is an
independent deputy but has close connections with the ARF one of the
members of which is his brother, Arayik Grigoryan.
Independent deputy Hmayak Hovhannisyan put forward the candidacy of
OYP member Mher Shahgeldyan although Arthur Baghdasaryan had announced
previously that they will not participate in the elections. But Hmayak
Hovhannisyan insisted that Shahgeldyan has carried out efficient work
and must remain in office. But Shahgeldyan refused to accept the
nomination, and the elections continued with one candidate.
The United Labor Party put forward the candidacy of Mnatsakan
Petrosyan for the post of the head of the Standing Committee on Social
Affairs, Health Care and Environment. He was the deputy head of the
Committee.
Both candidates were elected head of the Committees.

A1+
REPORT TO BE DISCUSSED IN PACE
[06:54 pm] 02 June, 2006
Strasbourg, 02.06.2006 – Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly
(PACE) rapporteur Dick Marty (Switzerland, SOC) will present his
report on alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers
involving Council of Europe member states to the Committee on Legal
Affairs and Human Rights in Paris on Wednesday 7 June.
The report is scheduled for debate during the plenary session of the
630-members-strong PACE in Strasbourg on Tuesday 27 June 2006.
Rapporteur Dick Marty and PACE President René van der Linden will give
a press conference on Wednesday 7 June at 1 pm at the Council of
Europe office in Paris (55, avenue Kléber, Métro Boissière).

Panorama,am
14:03 03/06/06

ARMENIA HAS POTENTIAL TO BE LEADING IN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
World-renowned mathematician, professor of Massachusetts Technology
Institute Semur Papert is in Yerevan lately. He is the founder of
artificial intellect and the author of Logo computer program. Papert
has also contributed a lot in pedagogy, particularly in managing
educational system through innovative technologies. Today he has
initiated `A laptop to each child’ project aimed to provide `very
cheap, clear and accessible computers’ to children.
To implement the project Papert needs assistance from countries that
have the potential in the field. That is the reason for his visit to
Armenia that, according to him `is one of the few countries that can
give new breath to digital technologies.’
The renowned scientist told Panorama.am that he has heard about
achievements of Armenia in mathematics and is happy to be in Armenia
today.
Papert is very well informed about Mashtots alphabet but also thinks
that `it is time to have new digital alphabet.’ He hopes that Armenia
can support him in his plan.
Yerevan State University has decided to give an honorable doctor title
to S. Papert on June 1. The certificate with honorably handed him over
today. The latter confessed that it was a surprise for him and even
said `he feels a little Armenian now.’
/Panorama.am/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

q.essay&essay_id=178977
Bombing Away the Past
by Tom Lewis
The Destruction of Memory:
Architecture at War.
By Robert Bevan.
Reaktion Books.
240 pp. $29.95
Reviewed by Tom Lewis
In his great poem “Lapis Lazuli,” William Butler Yeats indirectly
foretold the events that would soon consume the world: “Aeroplane and
Zeppelin will come out,/Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in/Until the
town lie beaten flat.” Yeats died in 1939, a few months after
publishing his poem and shortly before the world began to realize his
words to a degree unimagined by earlier ages. The poem evokes the
constant destruction throughout history of art and architecture, and
the ceaseless human desire to build again in the face of an unending
parade of “old civilizations put to the sword.” It is this long
history of material and cultural destruction, brought to unprecedented
intensity in the 20th century, that Robert Bevan documents.
To be sure, armies have been destroying cities since the days of the
Old Testament and Homer. But as Bevan demonstrates, science and the
increasing mechanization of the last two centuries have given
combatants the ability to increase vastly the thoroughness (and the
precision) of the devastation. The Destruction of Memory presents a
dark account of how that devastation is brought about, along with a
cogent argument for why it deserves recognition as an atrocity
separate from the human carnage it so often accompanies.
Bevan argues that the destruction of buildings, be they historic,
symbolic, or merely utilitarian, “is often the result of political
imperatives rather than simply military necessity.” Architecture, he
contends, “is not just maimed in the crossfire; it is targeted for
assassination or mass murder.” Significant buildings may be destroyed
as an adjunct to genocide, as propaganda for a cause, as a way of
demoralizing an enemy, or out of simple personal vindictiveness on the
part of the attackers or the victors. Bevan offers a veritable
taxonomy of heritage destruction. He considers genocide and its
attendant “cultural cleansing” in cases from Armenia to Bosnia;
symbolic attacks upon buildings by terror groups, including, of
course, the attacks of 9/11; the carpet-bombing of densely packed
cities such as Hamburg and Dresden in World War II; wholesale cultural
annihilation, as in the attempted Germanification of Warsaw by its
Nazi occupiers in 1944; religiously motivated destruction, such as the
Taliban’s obliteration of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001;
and the brutally dividing walls erected in Berlin, Belfast, and
Israel’s occupied territories, where architecture serves as an
instrument of suppression or exclusion.
Bevan’s grim statistics force readers to confront yet another
dimension of the savagery of our age. In the fighting that accompanied
the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, “more than 1,386 historic
buildings in Sarajevo were destroyed or severely damaged. . . . Gazi
Husrev Beg, the central mosque dating from 1530, received 85 direct
hits from the Serbian big guns.” During the 1914-18 world war, the
Turks engaged in atrocities against the Armenians, and “Armenian
churches, monuments, quar – ters, and towns were destroyed in the
process.” The Armenian city of Van “was almost entirely flat – tened.”
After the fall of Warsaw in World War II, “of 957 historic monuments
. . . , 782 were completely demolished and another 141 were partly
destroyed.” The historian Max Hastings found that by the end of
Operation Gomorrah, the Allied air raids against Hamburg in 1943,
“40,385 houses, 275,000 flats, 580 factories, 2,632 shops, 277
schools, 24 hospitals, 58 churches, 83 banks, 12 bridges, 76 public
buildings, and a zoo had been obliterated.” In Stalin’s Russia in the
1930s, where secular iconoclasm ruled, “an estimated 20-30 million
painted icons were destroyed-used for fuel, chopping boards, linings
for mine workings, and crates for vegetables.”
Such numbers do more than just reveal the extent of these cultural
atrocities; they point to an essential aspect of their purpose. As
Bevan shows, “the link between erasing any physical reminder of a
people and its collective memory and the killing of the people
themselves is ineluctable.” Genocide must be thorough. In Sarajevo,
Serbs intended to obliterate the Bosnians’ cultural heritage by
destroying their national library. The national museum met a similar
fate.
Bevan’s account of what befell the Polish capital, Warsaw, in World
War II makes a similar point. After the Nazi occupation of 1939, which
included the mass murder of Polish nobility, clergy, and Jewish
intellectuals, among others, Nazi town planners meant to use the city
as the site of a German garrison. But the Warsaw Uprising against the
Nazis by the Polish underground in 1944 changed German
attitudes. Regarding the city as “one of the biggest abscesses on the
Eastern Front,” Heinrich Himmler set up special forces “to demolish
the city street by street” and ordered the death of all inhabitants,
declaring that “the brain, the intelligence of this Polish nation,
will have been obliterated.” In the end, a quarter of a million people
died and just a third of Warsaw’s buildings remained standing.
Nor did one side hold proprietary rights to wanton destruction in that
war. Bevan writes of the British discovery early in 1942 of “burnable
towns,” densely packed wooden buildings at the heart of the medieval
precincts in many German cities. With the consent of Winston
Churchill’s war cabinet, which after contentious discussion decided
that such attacks would demoralize the German people, the Royal Air
Force, led by their commander, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, leveled the
medieval port city of Lübeck with firebombs. The wooden houses ignited
“more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation,” the commander
recalled. The destruction of Rostock, a city of no strategic value,
followed. In just 17 minutes Harris dropped a thousand tons of bombs
on Würzburg, a cathedral city without industry or defense. Hitler
meanwhile was unleashing violence on Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York,
Canterbury, and Coventry, each a three-star Baedeker city with no
great industrial capacity. Three years later, in February 1945, when
Hitler was near defeat, Harris and the U.S. Army Air Force struck a
final and completely unnecessary blow, visiting a firestorm upon
Dresden, a cultural center.
Harris himself contended that indiscriminate bombing was essential to
winning the war. After all, he wrote later, “a Hun was a Hun.” But his
bombing had little effect upon Germany’s war effort, as the commander
chose to avoid oil depots that were heavily defended. The scale of
destruction produced qualms on the Allied side. “The moment has come,”
Churchill wrote after Dresden, to review the policy of bombing German
cities “simply for the sake of increasing terror.”
>From their own fierce reaction to the bombing of London, the British
should have understood that while such attacks from the air upon
cities might have symbolic value, they have little practical
effect. In what is surely the most famous photograph of wartime
London, the unyielding dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rises in stark
relief above the smoking ruins of the razed city. Taken during the
Blitz of 1940, it appeared in The Daily Mail above a caption that read
in part, “It symbolises the steadiness of London’s stand against the
enemy: the firmness of Right against Wrong.” It served to inspire
Londoners’ determination in their darkest days. Just last summer,
Bevan notes, a British tabloid published the picture “once again
. . . following terrorist bombings on the London Underground.”
Contemporary terrorists who use the destruction of architecture as a
powerful weapon of propaganda do not always travel with Baedeker
guidebooks. As Osama Bin Laden and his like-minded followers have
shown, modern buildings with little or no significant architectural
merit can make attractive targets because of their symbolic value. The
Twin Towers, the critic Paul Goldberger wrote after their destruction,
“were gargantuan and banal, blandness blown up to a gigantic size.”
Striking at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Bevan writes, was
intended to send a message to Islamic militants across the world that
the time to act had come. Americans and others in the Western world
received a different message: Banal as the towers might have been,
they had now become “unintentional monuments.”
Such unintentional monuments become intentional ones in their
rebuilding, for reconstruction must take into account
destruction. Memory must have a place in the new. “History moves
forward,” Bevan observes, “while looking over its shoulder.” But how
much to commemorate? And how? Such questions become the focus of the
final chapters of The Destruction of Memory. Amid the rubble, we
sometimes see lost opportunities to make buildings an affirmative
statement of the human spirit, while at other times we see their power
to restore that spirit. Gazi Husrev Beg, the great mosque in Sarajevo,
survived the Serbian onslaught only to have its interior suffer a 1996
whitewashing that obliterated its spectacular decorations; the
“restoration” funds came from Saudi sources that demanded that an
austere Wahhabi interior replace the richly decorated walls
characteristic of Balkan Islamic architecture. As early as 1945, Poles
began to reconstruct Warsaw. In producing an exact replica of what had
been razed, the builders rescued their old city, but they also created
an amnesia about their recent history. In the great crater that was
the World Trade Center, those who consider rebuilding an act of
resistance are in conflict with those who want to make the site a
permanent memorial to the thousands who died on September 11. The
tension between creation and memorial is all the greater because we
are so near to the horror of the event.
“All things fall and are built again,” Yeats wrote in “Lapis Lazuli,”
“And those that build them again are gay.” The poem suggests that
people will go forward and rebuild with undiminished hope despite the
ever-growing weight of cultural destruction. But we cannot shrug off
the terrible devastation that is so much a part of our contemporary
condition. Better to follow the words inscribed on a plaque attached
to the ruined wall of Sarajevo’s national library: “Remember and
Warn.”
Tom Lewis, a professor of English at Skidmore College, is the author
of The Hudson: A History.
Reprinted from Spring 2006 Wilson Quarterly
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