Appeal to the CDU: The stop on admittance to the EU must not be used in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country which has been devastated by war!

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) is appealing urgently to the CDU to think again on its Europe election programme and to exempt Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country which has been devastated by war, from the threatened stop on admittance to the EU. "It would be scandalous to take from the survivors of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, from the wives, sisters and daughters of the 8,376 boys and men murdered in Srebrenica or from the victims of the Serb rape camps the hope of economic development and European integration”, said the GfbV chairperson, Tilman Zülch, on Tuesday in Göttingen. In its Europe election programme the Christian Democrats are calling now for a consolidation phase before new countries are taken up in the European community of states.

"Our human rights organisation draws attention to the fact that the Kohl government was a party to the signing of the Dayton Agreement”, said Zülch. "The CDU has since then - like the opposition – just accepted that the Serb nationalists prevented the return of the expelled non-Serb half of the people in the Republika Srpska. In full knowledge of this situation the CDU and then the German SPD government forced some 50,000 Bosnian refugees, who could not return to their hometowns, to emigrate to the USA or Canada .”

Zülch then pointed out that Bosnia and Herzegovina is geographically surrounded in the north, south and west by Croatia, which makes it clear that what is required is the joint acceptance of both states.