Daily Inspiration Quote by Alija Izetbegovic

A weary moral ledger runs underneath Izetbegovic's complaint: progress is being measured, but the costs are being assigned to the wrong people. The phrasing is diplomatic enough to pass through international ears ("pushing things forward") yet pointed enough to sting. He isn't rejecting outside involvement; he's indicting the kind of "forward" motion that treats Bosnian Muslims as the variable to be adjusted for stability, the constituency expected to concede more so others can declare success.

Context matters. Speaking from the vortex of the 1990s Bosnian war and its aftermath, Izetbegovic is addressing an international order that repeatedly promised protection and delivered managed containment: UN "safe areas" that were fatally unsafe, arms-embargo logic that punished the besieged, peace plans that translated ethnic cleansing into negotiating leverage. His subtext is that the international community's obsession with ending violence quickly can become a machine for legitimizing the results of violence. Peace, in this framing, is not neutrality; it is a distribution of burdens.

The line "I feel it as an injustice" is deliberately personal, almost anti-technocratic. It refuses the tidy language of "confidence-building measures" and "power-sharing arrangements" and insists on an ethical metric. The closing clause, "these are the things that I cannot live with", tightens the screw: it's not rhetoric for applause, it's a boundary. He is warning negotiators that the demand for compromise can turn into a demand for moral surrender - and that some settlements, however workable on paper, are politically and humanly uninhabitable.