Colonel (Ret.), Ing. Roman Kopřiva Ph.D.

"We were at a funeral where the remains of a Muslim were being buried. And they, the survivors, came down on us and demanded with all their might that the Serbs be punished and specifically named the people who did it, who killed him. You can't promise them anything like that. You can only work with that information, but you certainly cannot promise them that. Because you've been there for a while, and you've met these people. And then in the end you meet them and you more or less say, 'Yes, we have worked with that information, we know where he is, we know where he can be found, and now it's a question for other courts or for somebody else, it's not our business anymore.' Because they are demanding a vendetta. 'He is the one who killed my..., and you are going to investigate him here, and who knows what will happen to him in the end and so on.' However, even today, I believe that if you go there, the remaining hatred will be there, I remembered one such conflict recently. I had the opportunity to work in the Office of the Government, in the defence and security section. And I was at the meeting of the Bosnia and Herzegovina tripartite and our Prime Minister. Even though they were supposed to represent one country, each of them went against the other. In other words, when the Bosnian said that, the Serb immediately accused him of something. The Bosnian started to defend himself, and the Croat came in and started to disrupt the whole meeting, so it was very difficult for us as Czechs and for the Prime Minister to calm the situation down. But there you will understand quite clearly that the situation is not going to calm down. It may be a matter of generations, not even generations, but generations, if it will be calm there. Those who are watching today know that it's probably not going to be calm."

"There was a house not far from the base and there was always a little girl and somehow, every time we drove by in the car, I mean in an UAZ, we had an UAZ, so as soon as we got close she would start crying and run away. Always, always. And one time there were these old parents, we guessed it was grandma and grandpa because they were really in their seventies, the little girl could have been five or six years old, we don't know for sure. We suddenly stopped there and asked why that was. And they told us that when she was smaller, about three years old, that she eye-witnessed when her parents were murdered. And for us, such a high reward literally, any medal can go to hell in that sense, was when we actually stopped just before the end of the mission and she didn't run off and took the chocolate from us. And nobody understands that, I guess, but suddenly you find that it's something wonderful, that she stops worrying about some uniforms and things like that. It was a huge satisfaction for us that that willpower bore fruit."