The reason why the war ended in Bosnia was not because of amnesty but because a combined Croat-Bosnian offensive defeated the Serbs on the battlefield. Sometimes naïveté belongs not to the human rights activists but to the politicians. — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
I hate the tribal hatred thesis - in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and places like that they kill each other because that's just what people… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
Helping survivors of residential schools in Canada is not the same as the UN sending in peacekeepers to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. But… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
We need to sacrifice something. And this is what I find lacking. We want to construct an image of ourselves as virtuous but we… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
The reason why the war ended in Bosnia was not because of amnesty but because a combined Croat-Bosnian offensive defeated the Serbs on the… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
Criminal trials are fundamentally about individual accountability whereas truth commissions are less about the guilt of the perpetrator and more about the suffering of… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
Storytelling is very important. It is through context and relations that we understand the importance of human dignity. The concept means nothing as an… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
“There can be no meaningful change if we choose to look down at the arena of anguish from thirty thousand feet.” — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
In Yugoslavia we were told we were not only naive idealists in wanting war criminals to be prosecuted but that we were actually standing… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
There are realities that one needs to deal with, but very often what we are told is political reality is merely cynicism. One could… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
When we deconstruct how radical evil occurs we realize that it is anything but spontaneous combustion. You need pyromaniacs. — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
When I joined the UN War Crimes Tribunal, it was a realization of the dream of justice, that finally after Nuremberg, the UN is… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
In many instances violence - which obviously inflicts tremendous trauma on victims - also inflicts trauma on the perpetrator. Radical evil takes a lot… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
