Julian Borger > Quotes

“The lesson taught by the pursuit of the Yugoslav war criminals is that there can be no sustainable peace without some measure of justice.”
― Julian Borger, The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt

“The fact that the killing came to a halt so abruptly, as if a switch had been flicked, also demonstrates the decisive role of political leadership in creating the conditions for the mass murders of the 1990s. The nationalist leaders who assumed power at the breakup of Yugoslavia were not struggling to contain the murderous impulses of their people. On the contrary, they created circumstances for psychopaths and sadists to kill with impunity.”
― Julian Borger, The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt

“Yugoslavia marched into hell because its leaders took it there. When Communist dogma lost its already tenuous hold on people’s minds with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the more ideologically flexible and unscrupulous of the fading Communist elite, led by Milošević, switched to nationalism. The leaders packaged it as a new emotional certainty in the face of the chaos and fear left by the collapse of the old order. The challenges of converting a totalitarian state into a democracy, or turning a command economy into a free market, were waved away with colorful flags, hazy nostalgia, and folk music. Political”
― Julian Borger, The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt

“Hilary Mantel once said that history is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it,” and that is exactly how”
― Julian Borger, I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust