Franjo Tudjman Quotes

For 10 years, Kosovo was taboo. No one could officially tell the truth.

He was driven by the idea that when Milosevic grabs a part of Bosnia, Croatia should get a piece of it, too.

I believe that ultimately the situation in Kosovo can only be resolved through self-determination.

Let's make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years... Dayton isn't working. Nobody - except diplomats and petty officials - believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.

The U.S. actions in Kosovo - carving out an independent state based on ethnicity from within a sovereign nation - provided the precedent for Russia to carve Crimea out of Ukraine.

Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: "Everyone says, 'Never again. Never again.' But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw".

Serbs can only leave Kosovo.

We're not going to cure terrorism and spread peace and goodwill in the Middle East by killing innocent people, or I'm not even saying our bullets and bombs are killing them. The occupation that they don't have food. They don't have clean water. They don't have electricity. They don't have medicine. They don't have doctors.

We were in opposition to the decision to go to war. But after the war happened, it was clear that you could not sit and look-there would be a breeding ground for terrorism or a new collapsed or failed state named Iraq!

The Chechnya problem is a centuries-old problem. The thing is that today, fundamentalists and terrorists are exploiting those centuries-old problems to accomplish their own objectives that have nothing to do whatsoever with the interests of Chechnya.

Israel cannot afford to stand against the entire world and be denounced as the aggressor.

Violence in Darfur is cataclysmic.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

We have to bring stability to Iraq, otherwise we will be faced with a future dilemma of sending our loved ones into harms way to stop a civil war or the rise of a new tyrant born from the instability that we created.

Lebanon will be engulfed again in a huge power game that will last quite a long time. This is the tragic destiny of Lebanon.

Hours before the Georgian invasion, Russia had been working to secure a United Nations Security Council statement calling for a renunciation of force by both Georgia and South Ossetians. The statement that could have averted bloodshed was blocked by western countries.

Well the war lasted for three months, from April of 1994 until the Tutsi army, the exiles as it were, gained control of the country and then it stopped.

The one indication that I got that I was doing the right job in Bosnia was that at different periods of time all the factions came down very hard on me.

I mean, I can look back with great pleasure on what has happened in Sudan, and our commitment to people who are persecuted in that kind of way.

Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars.

We want peace and a political solution to the situation in Chechnya.

Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world.

My mission was to save Rwanda. Their mission was to put on a show with no risk.

My opponents ask why we haven’t yet solved the Bosnian problem. Well, it started in 1369.