Europe’s perverse approach to Serbia

The President of the Society for Threatened Peoples International, Tilman Zülch, described today as perverse Europe’s approach to Serbia in the declaration of the EU Commissioner, Olli Rehn, that Serbia has made progress in cooperating with the International War Crimes Trribunal at The Hague. "Practically everyone today is aware that the government of Serbia knows where the two main war criminals, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, are to be found”, commented Zülch. With deference to the majority in the country, who have a nationalist outlook, the search was suspended and so extradition has been made impossible. It is intolerable that the criminal country of Serbia should now approach the EU and that the victim country of Bosnia-Herzegovina should be denied this privilege, said the President of the GfbV International. And this not least for the reason that the so-called "Republika Srpska” as the ethnically cleansed half of Bosnia is blocking the progress of the building up of the Bosnian state and obstructing the reforms demanded by the EU. "So the Bosnian survivors of the concentration and rape camps, of the massacres and shelling, which lasted for years, are being doubly punished”. Serbia signed yesterday the so-called stabilisation and association agreements with the EU in Brussels.

We now lay out once again the criminal methods of this genocide, unique in Europe since the Second World War, which was carried out from Belgrade. We commemorate all victims, over 90% of whom were Bosnians (Moslems), without in the least forgetting the victims of the Croat, Serb, Jewish and Roma nationalities of Bosnia:

1. The setting up of more than one hundred concentration and internment camps and the imprisonment of over 200,000 civilians;

2. The murder of about 30,000 detainees in camps like Omarska, Manjaca, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brcko, Susica and Foca;

3. The rape of about 30,000 women and the setting up of rape camps, some of which were operated for months;

4. The systematic arrest and murder of members of the academic and political elite and of leaders of industry and commerce;

5. The flight and expulsion of about 2.2 million Bosnians and the scattering of hundreds of thousands over four continents;

6. The encircling, starving and shelling of over 500,000 Bosnians in so-called UN protected zones for more than four years (Sarajevo, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Zepa and Bihac);

7. The killing of over 11,000 inhabitants of the city of Sarajevo, among them 1500 children;

8. Massacres and mass shootings in many communities and towns of north, west and east Bosnia Posavina and the Prijedor and Podrinje regions);

9. The murder of more than 8,300 boys and men in Srebrenica;

10. The burying in mass graves of those murdered in more than 600 mass graves in all the occupied areas;

11. The planned destruction of many villages and Ottoman old town centres;

12. The total destruction of the material Islam and largely also of the Catholic culture, among these being some 1,300 mosques and madrasas and some 500 Catholic churches;

13. The search for about 13,000 persons still missing and their necessary exhumation and identification.