Jews Urge US to Help Bosnian Muslims

and Prevent New Holocaust

The following article, entitled “Nazi campaign: Al Gore urged not to allow repeat”, was published on
20 April 1993 by The Southeast Missourian.

By John King, (AP)

WARSAW – Polish Jews recalled the Nazi campaign to exterminate their families and implored Vice
President Al Gore on Monday to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust’s horrors against Bosnian
Muslim (Bosniak) communities in Bosnia.
“The world must do more to stop these outrages,” Gore said with evident emotion after the pleadings.
The dramatic entreaties came as Gore visited Poland to mark the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto
uprising, a valiant but unsuccessful revolt against the Nazis by Jews they had confined to one area of
the city. Execution by the Germans, disease and hunger has reduced the ghetto from 500,000 to 60,000
at the time of the revolt in April 1943. The Nazis killed most of the rebels.
Gore also held the Clinton administration’s first meetings with senior Polish officials, including
President Lech Walesa and Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka. He assured them that the United States
remains committed to Poland’s democracy and evolving market economy.
“No other country in Eastern or Central Europe has been as bold and as effective in making the
transition to a free market economy,” Gore said.
The vice president also met with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was in Warsaw for the
uprising anniversary. But all the diplomatic pomp was overshadowed by an early afternoon
meeting in a Jewish community center. Polish Jews summoned the pain of the Holocaust, in which
six million European Jews were killed by the Nazis, to impress upon Gore their moral case for
preventing a present-day repeat in Bosnia.
Much of the violence in the former Yugoslavia has been directed at Bosnian Muslims in what U.S. and
allied officials have said is part of a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” directed by Serbs.
Rabbi Pinchas Joskowicz, a concentration camp survivor, pointedly asked Gore what the United
States would do to avoid allowing “the Holocaust of 50 years ago to occur again.”
A short time later, a Jewish journalist from Poland told Gore he had been to Sarajevo and witnessed the
suffering.
“You are the vice president of the biggest superpower in the world,” said Konstanty Gebbert.
Gebbert said the carnage in the former Yugoslavia had made him think for the first time that the
Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish freedom fighters “maybe actually lost” if their uprising failed to put the world
on notice to prevent any future Holocaust.
Visibly moved, Gore recounted U.S. efforts to tighten sanctions on the Serbs and said those efforts had
intensified in recent days.