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REMARKS BY THE HEAD OF MISSION AT READ BiH EVENT
National Library, Srebrenica, May 16, 2008
Good morning. I should like to begin by thanking Mrs Jovanovic for making this event possible. We in the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina are very grateful for her – and your – support and assistance.
We began our “Read BiH” campaign, which is what has brought me to Srebrenica this morning, earlier this spring, in Travnik. So far this campaign has come to 15 libraries across the country. Each has offered a warm welcome. We have also now received more than 80 inquiries from other libraries wanting to become a part of this initiative, which, at its core, is about restoring the centrality and importance of reading to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This is heartening. But I think this enthusiastic response to our campaign has less to do with us than it does with books themselves. They may seem a strange thing to mount a campaign about these days, for they are hardly a “new media”; as a medium they go back, in one way or another, more than two thousand years. But, as their very longevity suggests, there is something uniquely and enduringly valuable about books. If nothing else, they are certainly portable. You can take them with you anywhere, and you don’t need electricity, batteries, or wireless connections to use them.
More important, they unite rather than divide. Books bridge and bring together all cultures that value learning and free inquiry and creativity and justice and truth. The great works of literature of this country, no matter what the nationality of their authors, all in the end show how complex such national identifications and labels truly are. By doing this, they also teach that the essence of identity transcends nationality and links us together in a larger way as unique individuals, each in our own right, and as fellow human beings.
If the passion for reading, the power of the book, is lost, as is increasingly happening in all our countries, where the television and the internet and the video game and the DVD and the MP3 player and all the rest are so seductive of our time and attention, then the teachings and lessons these books contain will soon be lost with them. That would be a pity—and a detriment to this country’s future. This is why, with the support of DANI Magazine, we have decided to donate sixty exceptional books to libraries in every part of this country.
Countries in which citizens are accustomed to reason, to think, and to create as well as to try to understand different peoples and cultures and ways of living – countries in which, in other words, the culture of reading still exists – are countries that have an advantage over others. Reading helps both children and adults by giving them the tools they need to form and shape their thoughts and notions and ideas about how to react to events in the world around them. It helps them question what they are told, separate the true from the false, and choose between right and wrong. It also helps them to invent and to innovate and initiate actions on their own — and thus to advance their societies economically as well. Reading, in other words, makes them better citizens because it makes them better prepared for life in a democratic state and in an ever-shrinking world.
My hope is that Read BiH will do all these things for the people of this country — and also help them to retain their common heritage as People of the Book. As the noted American historian Barbara Tuchman once said, “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.” I believe that books are especially important in a place like Srebrenica, which is struggling both to overcome its horrific recent history and at the same time to build a better life for those people who live here now and those who would like to live here in the future.
Read BiH is, in our small way, an effort to help this country ensure that its complex and rich and tolerant civilization carries on and helps create a better, more peaceful, and more prosperous future for all its people and peoples.
Thank you.
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