Bosnian victims of the ethnic cleansing appreciate the appointment of Schwarz-Schilling as the UN-Representative

Fadila Memisevic, spokesperson at the Sarajevo office of the Society for Threatened Peoples, and Hatidza Mehmedovic from Srebenica have informed us that the appointment of Christian Schwarz-Schilling as the United Nation’s High Representative in Bosnia yielded overwhelming assent by surviving victims of the ethnic cleansing, refugees, and former prisoners of rape and concentration camps.

The Society for Threatened Peoples hopes that Christian Schwarz-Schilling, the former mediator for Bosnia, will be able to reunite the divided country. Tilman Zülch, president of the Society for Threatened Peoples, asserts: ‘In the name of the Dayton Convention the member states of the contact group on Bosnia have cemented the division of Bosnia and allowed the political party of the serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic to stay in power in the Republic Srbska (RS) until today. Thus, they ultimately prevented the return of 95% of the refugees from the Republika Srbska. 95% make up 800.000 people and 50% of the population of the part of Bosnia that is controlled by the Serbs. In this context, we wish to point out that the German ministers of the interior are responsible for the deportation of 50.000 Bosnian refugees, who were in fact not able to return to the overcrowded rest of their home country. The vast majority of these refugees settled down in the U.S.A, Canada and Australia; nations that were delighted by the arrival of such hard-working and adaptive new citizens.’

The Society for Threatened Peoples wishes to stress once again UN’s unforgivable failure regarding the war and genozide in Bosnia. Rather than protecting the civil society in the isolated and demolished towns and rescueing civilians from rape and concentration camps, international troops were only concerned with their personal safety. The French, British and Russian governments openly promoted the Serbian policy that concerned Bosnia. The German government failed to intervene when Croatia conquered Bosnia-Herzegowina and established the notorious internment camp Heliodrom, that was designed for 10.000 Bosniacs, Most German politician did not even protest when Croation troops rounded up the Muslim and Roma population in the Old City of Mostar to torture them over a period of months.

Tilman Zülch exclaims: ‘The five prominent German political parties opposed to a military intervention in Bosnia for four years in spite of the destruction of 1350 mosques, Islamic schools and chapels, referred to Tekijes, and the first extermination of a vast majoritity of non-Christian Europeans since the Third Reich. Christian Schwarz-Schilling was one of the few who protested against the government’s inaction and even resigned from his ministerial post after Helmut Kohl had rejected a concrete initiative for Bosnia. The Social Democrat Freimut Duve, the Christian Democrats Stefan Schwarz, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Marieluise Beck, Eva Quistorp from the Green Party, and the GAL from Hamburg also belonged to the ‘White Ravens’ who openly condemned the German government on behalf of its refusal to help the Bosnian civil society.

If requested we can send you a 4-page report on the most horrendous war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegowina. In 1992, the Society for Threatened Peoples published its first book on the genocide in Bosnia and gave a list with the names 25,000 killed victims and 1350 war criminals to the Bassiouni-Commission of the United Nations, which provided a basis for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslawia in The Hague. Furthermore, the Society for Threatened Peoples provided the tribunal with material, enabled eye witnesses to express their experiences in the German and International media, and made information, that were vital for the conviction of Serbian war criminals in German, available to the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA).