Like unjust wars, just wars bring suffering. Like just peaces, unjust peaces bring relief from suffering. There are causes for which a people will agree to suffer greatly. And yet there are no causes for which a people will agree to suffer completely, unto extinction. And so there are times when the wronged will be forced, for moral and practical reasons, to dignify what has wronged them, so as to stop it.
Practical reasons are moral reasons, for victims.
That is their final humiliation. They must, for their own sake, lose their interest in justice. These thoughts we offer as an exegesis of Alija Izetbegovic's face, of the haunted, sickened countenance with which he shook the hands of the men who almost managed to destroy his country completely, and initialed the diplomatic instrument that delivered half of Bosnia to the people who raped, tortured and murdered their way to what they now call Republika Srpska. A genocidal war has succeeded in realizing fully half of its political and territorial aims. It does not condemn the consequences of ethnic cleansing, it codifies them.