"Pillar of Shame" is to retain in memory those who shared responsibility for the crime of genocide in 1995

The General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), Tilman Zülch, welcomed the initiative of the four mothers' movements of Srebrenica, to erect a "Pillar of Shame" at the place of execution of Potocari. On this pillar are to be engraved the names of persons who failed to help the victims of the genocide before the massacre and who thus contributed to the dreadful happening. Those persons are also to be mentioned who have obstructed the arrest of the main war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. The first "candidates" for this list are Yasushi Akashi, the former personal representative of the UN General Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali in former Yugoslavia , Tom Karremanns, the UN ex-commander of the Dutch UN battalion and others. Tilman Zülch is besides Tadeusz Mazowiecky and the US congressman Chris Smith, who worked for the removal of the arm s-embargo against Bosnia , one of the three prize-winners of the "Srebrenica Award against Genocide".

Workers of the German, Swiss and Bosnian sections of the GfbV are taking part today at the interment of 307 more exhumed and identified victims of the Serb mass murder of 8376 Bosnian Muslim boys and men known by name from the town of Srebrenica . For the members and friends of the GfbV the anniversary of the crime of genocide of Srebrenica (11.07.1995) is particularly moving because the husband and the two sons of the head of the GfbV office in Srebrenica, Hatidza Mehmedovic, were among the dead. It was not until 13^th November last year that the remains of her husband were found in one of the 60 mass graves discovered so far. In another the remains of one of her sons were found. Three of his ribs were broken and he was undressed. For this reason the mother does not to the present day know which of her two sons lay in the mass grave. The father could also not be buried because so far only half of his remains have been found. The Serb crimin als had opened many mass graves with bulldozers, loaded the dead onto lorries and dumped them into rough graves in the Bosnian woods.

The graveyard with the memorial-site and the genocide museum opposite is now one of the largest European genocide memorial sites. Thanks to the initiative of the former High Representative of the international community in Bosnia , Christian Schwarz-Schilling, the memorial site was removed from the Serb controlled "Republik Srpska" and placed under the jurisdiction of the central government in Sarajevo . Since today 3214 of the 8376 victims are buried there. So far about 6500 have been exhumed, of which about 4000 have been already identified.