10 years of Society for Threatened Peoples's Bosnia & Herzegovina Section - 15 years working for the victims of the genocide

"Tomorrow, as another 465 of the 8376 murdered boys and men of Srebrenica are laid to rest, taking the number of those buried in the cemetery at Potocari to 2907, the time has come for the town where Europe's worst massacre since the end of the Second World War took place to be granted special autonomous status", declared STP International's President Tilman Zülchi, speaking in Sarajevo. Srebrenica should be taken out of the Serb mini-state of Republika Srpska, an entity that has no historic basis and whose creation required the expulsion and elimination of the non-Serbs who made up half its population". Those survivors who have now returned home to Srebrenica, the mothers of Srebrenica and their children now reaching adulthood, are entitled to manage their own affairs, along with decent-minded Bosnian Serbs living in the town and the 56 villages lying within the former U.N. protected area.

3893 victims whose remains have been recovered have still to be identified while the bodies of 1576 victims whose names are known have not yet been located. Earlier this year the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that genocide had been perpetrated against the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica. In 2005 a Serb-Bosniak Joint Commission reported in Banja Luka that 19473 Serb men from Bosnia and Serbia had taken part in the crimes committed at Srebrenica. 810 of these men are currently employed by the so-called Republika Srpska, 504 of them still serving as police officers in Srebrenica and the neighbouring ethnically cleansed towns of the Drina Valley.

Society for Threatened Peoples and its Bosnian Section welcome the decision by Christian Schwarz-Schilling, the outgoing High Representative for Bosnia, at the end of June 2006 to remove the cemetery and memorial and the former battery factory opposite them in Potocari, near Srebrenica, from the jurisdiction of the Republika Srpska. The locality is now administered by the Bosnian central government. The Director of the Republika Srpska Police Force is unwilling to acknowledge the new situation and refuses to withdraw his own police officers and hand over responsibility for Potocari to the Bosnian national police, the SIPA. "This is only a first step", Fadila Memisevicii, Director of Society for Threatened Peoples's Bosnia & Herzegovina Section, asserted in Potocari, at the place where Dutch soldiers with United Nations blue helmets helped Serb military units from Bosnia and Serbia separate the men and older boys from the women, children and elderly. Christian Schwarz-Schilling should have gone further.

The second step that he should have already taken is the one we are now waiting to see the new High Representative, Miroslav Lajcak from Slovakia, take.

"Every day since our return home to Srebrenica, we mothers find ourselves face to face with those same individuals who snatched our sons from our arms at Potocari on 11 July 1995. Today those men are employed as police officers, "standing guard" over our dead menfolk who are supposed to be resting in peace in the cemetery at Potocari", remarked Hatidza Mehmedovic, in charge of STP's Srebrenica office. Ms Mehmedovic returned home to Srebrenica alone in October 2002. On 11 July 1995 she lost her two adolescent sons, her husband and all the other male members of her family.

In the town of Srebrenica and the 56 villages on the surrounding hillsides approximately 4500 returnees live in desperate poverty. The majority are widows with children, some forced to live in boarded-up basements or ruined houses. Most of the roads have been destroyed, along with power lines and water pipes. Most of the Bosniak returnees are unemployed, with no adequate medical care and only a third of their ruined homes rebuilt.

"We need an international programme of reconstruction and economic development for Srebrenica and the other ethnically cleansed towns along the Drina. This is essential if the two national communities are to come together and live with one another again. It is only here and there that a patchy start to reconciliation is being made in Srebrenica", the three spokespeople for Society for Threatened Peoples International declared. Bosnia & Herzegovina, the principal victim of the wars of the former Yugoslavia, cannot continue to be rebuffed by the E.U. The artificial ethnically-cleansed entity of Republika Srpska cannot be allowed an indefinite veto on Bosnian reunion when ethnic communities are living together in almost every other part of Europe. Bosnia's subdivision into two entities by the West at Dayton must end and be replaced by a general federation of cantons. When is the international community finally going to arrest the two war criminals Karadzic and Mladic, and when will they take action to ensure that "minor" war criminals are no longer allowed to serve in the police force and administration?

i T. Zülch has been awarded the Silver Order of the Republic of Bosnia & Herzegovina in 1996, the Srebrenica Award Against Genocide of the Mothers' Associations in 2006 and the 2006 Freedom Prize of the International Peace Centre in Sarajevo. Publications include "Ethnische Säuberung für Großserbien" ["Ethnic Cleansing in the Cause of Greater Serbia"] (Luchterhand, 1993) und "Die Angst des Dichters vor der Wirklichkeit, 16 Antworten auf Peter Handkes Reise nach Serbien" ["The Writer's Fear of Reality, 16 responses to Peter Handke's visit to Serbia"] (Steidel Verlag, 1996).

ii Fadila Memisevic, Director of STP's Bosnia-Herzegovina Section, heads the organisation's Sarajevo office. She was awarded the Swiss Human Rights Prize in 1996. The Section's Administrative Board includes representatives of all the ethnic and religious communities and the associations of concentration camp and women's camp detainees, as well as women from Srebrenica. From 1992 to 1996 she worked at STP's office in Göttingen, Germany, coordinating the efforts of more than 100 Bosnian refugee and exile associations and numerous Bosnian human rights groups and relief committees throughout Central Europe.