EU has given away its trump card – Serbian war criminals still at large

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) regrets the hasty agreement of the EU foreign ministers on the signing of the EU Association Agreement with Serbia. "The EU has now given away a trump card to force the delivery of the presumed Serbian war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic”, criticised the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch, on Tuesday in Göttingen. The "conditions” which the foreign ministers want to link with the ratification of the agreement must now be formulated so tightly that Serbia cannot get out of a close cooperation with the UN War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

It is for many survivors of the Bosnian war unbearable that Serbia is being given concrete hopes of an EU rapprochement before an agreement with Bosnia-Herzegovina has been settled, said Zülch and warned: "Europe must make it clear that there can be no question of everyday relations as long as the evil past has not been dealt with. Those responsible for the worst war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina must be brought to justice. This is what Europe owes to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina and above all to the survivors!” In the so-called UN protected zone at least 8,373 Bosnian boys and men were murdered by Serbian units in front of the very eyes of the peace-keeping troops.

The GfbV points out that the regime of Slobodan Milosevic together with the forces of the Bosnian Serbs from the present-day Republika Srpska under the command of Mladic and Karadzic were responsible for the setting-up of over 100 internment, concentration and raping camps. More than 200,000 Bosnian civilians were held in the camps and over 20,000 of them were killed. About 30,000 Bosnian women were victims of systematic mass rape.