Indignation and horror at the destruction of pieces of evidence concerning the victims of Srebrenica

It is with indignation and horror that the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) registered that the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague has destroyed evidence from mass graves of the victims of Srebrenica. "The irreparable destruction of personal items rescued from the exhumation of the graves is a monstrous scandal”, said the President of the GfbV International, Tilman Zülch, on Monday in Göttingen. "With the destruction of identity papers, photos and articles of clothing belonging to the dead the survivors, who often for many years did not know what had happened to their relatives, have now suffered for a second time severe injustice and pain.”

"If anyone had dared to destroy the documents of the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt there would have been an international outcry, a veritable storm of protest. We want now on behalf of the wives and children of Srebrenica to call out to this storm of protest”, said Tilman Zülch for the GfbV International and Sharon Silber (New York) for Jews Against Genocide. Many Jewish organisations and celebrities, among them Simon Wiesenthal, Marek Edelman, Ernst Tugendhat, Roy Gutman, Susan Sontag, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, Bernard Levi, Milan Stern, Marcel Ophüls, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and David Kamphi, have raised their voices for the threatened Bosnian Moslems and emphasised that the murder of 8,373 Moslem Bosnian men and boys recall the crimes of the Third Reich. Several of the criminals of Srebrenica were convicted by the War Crimes Tribunal for genocide.

The Chief Prosecutor of the Tribunal, Serge Brammertz, admitted according to a report of the Dutch news agency ANP during his visit to Sarajevo last week that about 1000 items belonging to exhumed Srebrenica victims have been destroyed. These had been photographed for the archives. "And yet there are at the memorial site of Potocari near Srebrenica large workshops belonging to the former accumulator factory, which served the Dutch UN Blue Helmets as a base, as a museum for the collection of documents and pieces of evidence”, said Zülch.

The GfbV documented the crimes in Bosnia at the end of 1992 with the first book published in the world on the genocide, organised an international congress in Bonn in 1995 on the genocide and supported the encircled Bosnians throughout the war with a large number of political and humanitarian initiatives.

Tilman Zülch can be reached for further information and interviews at tel. ++49 (0)551 151 153 09 888.