Autor: Bnet Press

BOSANSKI / BOSNIAN

Background to Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992-1995 1. More than 100 concentration, internment and rape camps with over 200,000 civilians held prisoner 2. Many thousands of prisoners murdered in concentration camps including Omarska, Manjaca, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brcko, Sušica and Foca 3. Systematic detention and murder of members of intellectual and political elites. 4. Flight and expulsion of approximately 2.2 million Bosnians and their dispersal around the world 5. Many thousands of unrecorded and unacknowledged deaths among children, the elderly and the sick, injured and incapacitated during and as a result of their flight and expulsion 6. Siege, starvation, shelling and partial extermination of 500,000 Bosnians in the UN "safe areas" of Tuzla, Goražde, Srebrenica, Žepa and Bihac lasting for nearly four years. 7. Bombardment of the sixth UN "safe area" of Sarajevo for nearly four years, costing 11,000 lives including 1500 children. 8. Massacres and mass killings in many towns and municipalities in northern, western and eatsern Bosnia (Posavina, Prijedor area and Podrinje). 9. Systematic destruction of hundreds of villages and towns. 10. Comprehensive destruction of Islamic cultural monuments and extensive destruction of Catholic cultural monuments, including 1189 mosques and medresas and as many as 500 Catholic churches and religious establishments, together with 38 Orthodox churches. 11. Ongoing investigation of the whereabouts of approximately 15,000 missing persons and exhumation and identification of remains. 12. Kidnapping and mistreatment of 284 UN soldiers used as human shields 13. Rape of more than 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women in rape camps and elsewhere 14. Murder of 8372 Bosniaks from the town of Srebrenica, mostly men and boys but including 560 women, and their burial in mass graves 15. Killing of approximately 150,000 people through "ethnic cleansing" and its consequences.

This week, ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of the genocidal slaughter at Srebrenica on 11 July, Society for Threatened Peoples reaffirms its support for the proposal to erect a "Pillar of Shame" - "Stup srama" in Bosnian - at the site of the genocide in Potocari and calls for the demolition of Europe's "Wall of Shame" excluding the people of Bosnia.

In a press release issued by Society for Threatened Peoples International (STP-I) on 11 July 2008, Tilman Zülch, President of STP-I, welcomed the proposal by the four associations of Mothers of Srebrenica to erect a Pillar of Shame at the Potocari site. This Pillar of Shame was to be engraved with the names of individual representatives of the international community who failed to come to the assistance of the people of Srebrenica and so contributed to the terrible outcome. Alongside these names would be the names of individuals who helped obstruct the arrest of the principle war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. At the head of the list of candidates for commemoration were the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Representative in the former Yugoslavia Yasushi Akashi, former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN commanders General Bernard Janvier and General Phillipe Morillon and the commander of the Netherlands UN battalion at Potocari Tom Karremanns, among others.

Now the Center for Political Beauty in Berlin has joined hands with the Mothers of Srebrenica to make a start on preparations for the construction of an 8 m-high Pillar of Shame overlooking the Srebrenica Memorial Center and the cemetery for the victims of the genocide at Potocari. On 11 July Center for Political Beauty - supported by Society for Threatened Peoples and the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide - will assemble a mound of 16,744 shoes.

In Berlin, representing 8372 inhabitants of the town who perished. These shoes will later be used in the construction of the Pillar.

In recent weeks Society for Threatened Peoples's national offices in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Bosnia and Herzegovina have been involved in activities supporting the Centre for Political Beauty initiative. The project has been greeted with enthusiastic support in Bosnia itself and also among the wider community of refugees and expulsees scattered throughout the world in another 52 countries.

Nevertheless, something more than the eloquent gesture of this symbolic "Monument of Shame" is called for. We are also demanding the demolition of the "Wall of Shame" built by the West to punish the victims, the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Under the 1995 Dayton Agreement, co-signed by the U.S.A., France, the United Kingdom and Germany among others, Bosnia was divided in two and half of the country handed over to the Serb aggressors. Despite the Agreement's notional guarantee of a right of return for all refugees and expulsees, the UN troops deployed along the border between the two entities policed the country's partition instead of assisting the refugees' efforts to return home.

Today Bosnia is a divided, increasingly impoverished nations. The victims of the war - rape victims, the war-wounded, bomb victims, former concentration camp inmates, refugees and expulsees - have been forgotten.

As Serbia and Croatia draw ever closer to membership of the European Union, already enjoying the advantages of their freedom from visa restrictions, it is Bosnia, the country that was the victim of the war and genocide, that is treated as a pariah. Bosnian citizens are imprisoned in their own country by the "Wall of Shame" Europe has erected.

Between 1992 and 1995 the governments of France and the United Kingdom did everything they could to assist the war of aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina by Serbian armies and militia. On the ground French, British and Canadian senior commanders of the UN forces took the side of the Serb aggressors. Simon Wiesenthal, the great Jewish civil rights activist, along with Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto freedom fighters, Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Susan Sontag, André Glucksmann and many others challenged Europe's failure to speak out, repeatedly denounced Europe's complicity and drew logical comparisons with the Holocaust.



The Kohl/Kinkel government bears a heavy share of blame. While Serbia had access to the entire arms industry of Yugoslavia and the besieged inhabitants of Sarajevo, Bihac, Tuzla and Mostar were being forced to rely on meagre arsenals of weapons, the German government called for a regional arms embargo. When President Bill Clinton sent envoys to Western Europe to conduct discussions with governments about an intervention in Bosnia, Germany's Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel refused to meet with them.

We, the supporters of the "Pillar of Shame" initiative, are now calling on their behalf for the creation of the "Coalition of the Good-willing" . Bosnia, like Germany, needs to be reunited so that all the country's citizens can go back home. Bosnians must not be condemned by the failings of their country's politicians to the same isolation within their own country as they experience outside it, Tilman Zülch, President of STP-International and Kornelia Rainer-Schröder, Board member, STP Austria.

We insist that:
- the guilty parties in the Serbian army, militia and politicians must be identified and held to account;

Tilman Zülch is, together with Tadeusz Mazowiecki and US Congressman Chris Smith who campaigned for the lifting of the arms embargo against Bosnia, one of the three recipients of the "Srebrenica Award against Genocide“ awarded by the Mothers' associations of Srebrenica. He has also been awarded the "Silver Lily" of the Bosnian State Presidency and the "Sloboda" Prize of the Bosnian Antiwar Centre

- Europe's contribution to the war and genocide, and in particular the role played by France, the United Kingdom and the other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany's own complicity and failures must not be forgotten;
- the major war criminal Ratko Mladic must be arrested and delivered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague;
- Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the country that was the victim of aggression, must be granted admission to the European Union ahead of Serbia;
- Bosnia and Herzegovina must be admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO;
- visa requirements for all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina must be removed;
- the many current instances of "apartheid" arising from the systematic segregation of the Orthodox, Muslim and Catholic communities must be ended;
- all religious communities and ethnic minorities must be guaranteed equal treatment throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina;
- a Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina must be implemented.