Radovan Karadjic has been arrested, but his work, the "ethnic cleansing”, he genocide and the expulsion were confirmed and cemented in Dayton !

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has worked continuously for the Bosnian victims since 1992. It has documented the crimes. Together with tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees and exile-Bosnians it has protested against the international silence. Western Europe and the USA stood by watching the crimes of Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and Slobodan Milosevic for four years and instead of putting an immediate end to the genocide did nothing.

 

"Radovan Karadzic has been arrested, but his work, the "ethnic cleansing”, the genocide and the expulsion were confirmed and cemented in Dayton through the division of Bosnia ”, said the President of the GfbV International, Tilman Zülch.

 

Hundreds of thousands have to the present day not been able to return.

 

An authoritaria n partial republic ("Republika Srpska”) committed to the model of Greater Serbia exists on half of the Bosnian territory.

 

Only 8% of the approximately 60% of the non-Serb people living there before the war have been able to return. Genuine reconciliation has not been possible, although tens of thousands of Serb Bosnians under the leadership of the Serb Citizens’ Council fought and suffered for the goal of a joint Bosnia . For 500 years Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural country. The two divided states, "Republika Srpska” and the "Bosnian-Croatian Federation” must be dissolved and the joint republic restored. The Society for Threatened Peoples further demands the arrest of the third chief war criminal, Ratko Mladic. Between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians have fallen victim to the crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina . In the light of the war crimes in Bosnia Marek Edelman, last surviving leader of the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto has said: " Europe has learnt nothing from the Holocaust. Bosnian is a posthumous victory for Hitler.” Simon Wiesenthal felt reminded of "elements of the Holocaust”. Both have accompanied the work of the GfbV and given it their selfless support. The victims of the genocide in Bosnia were over 90% Bosniaks (Moslems), but equally unforgotten are the victims of the Croatian, Serb, Jewish and Roma nationalities,

 

Facts on the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina :

1. Setting up of over one hundred concentration and internment camps and the arrest of over 200,000 civilians.

2. Murder of approximately 30,000 prisoners in camps like Omarska, Manjaca, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brcko, Susica, Foca and others.

3. Systematic arrest and murder of relatives of the academic and political elites.

4. Flight and expulsion of approximately 2.2 million Bosnians and their scattering over four continents. Thousands, not counted by any institution and not included in the statistics, of people killed during and after the deportations among children, old people, sick and wounded.

5. Encircling, starvation, shelling and partial liquidation of 500,000 Bosnians in so-called UN protected zones for nearly four years ( Sarajevo , Gorazde, Srebrenica, Zepa, Cerska and Bihac).

6. Killing of over 11,000 inhabitants of the city of Sarajevo , among them 1,500 children.

7. Massacre and mass-shooting in many towns and cities of North, West and West Bosnia (Posavina, the Prijedor region and Podrinje).

8. Planned destruction of hundreds of villages and city areas.

9. Total destruction of the material Islamic and largely also Catholic culture, among them 1,300 mosques and madrasas and about 500 Catholic churches.

10. Search for about 15,000 persons missing and the exhumation necessary for their identification.

11. Taking of hostages and misuse of 284 UN soldiers as human shields for Karadzic’s soldiers.

12. Rape camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina :

Approximately 20,000 mainly Moslem women were victims of systematic rape by Serb troops. Many rape-camps were set up mainly in East Bosnia in towns like Foca, Rogatica and Visegrad. In many concentration camps women were held prisoner and mishandled for months, tortured and raped. The raping was carried out as a plan and with the aim of destroying the families of the Bosniaks, to humiliate the women and to speed up the expulsion. The victims of these crimes are today severely traumatised, for the most part impoverished and cannot return to their home-towns in the so-called "Republika Srpska”. The criminals are still living there today.

13. Crimes of genocide in Srebrenica:

After three years of siege the so-called UN protected area fell in July 1995 after a Serb large-scale offensive into the hands of General Ratko Mladic. He ordered that all men and male youngsters should be shot and all women, children and old people be deported in lorries and buses. In spite of its UN status as a protected area and the complete disarming of its soldiers the district was given up by the Dutch soldiers stationed there and the UN. They allowed the Serb army to separate first the men and male youngsters from the women and children and then murder them. The youngest victim was 12, the oldest 84 years old. So far about 6,500 murdered persons have been exhumed from mass graves. 4,000 have so far been identified and 3,214 of t hem have been buried in the cemetery of the Memorial Centre at Potocari near Srebrenica. The ICTY at The Hague passed sentence on General Radoslav Krstic for the first time in 2001 for the genocide committed in Srebrenica. The International Court of Justice at The Hague (ICJ) confirmed in the framework of the action brought by Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbia in the year 2007 confirmed the genocide committed in Srebrenica and held the army and the police of the "Republika Srpska” responsible. Among those murdered were 571 women.

14. Crimes of genocide in the district of Prijedor:

On 30.04.1992 the District Prijedor taken by Serb forces and paramilitary. First the members of the intellectual, administrative and industrial elite, for the most part Bosniaks, but also Croats, arrested in a planned operation on the streets and at their homes and taken to the factory buildings near Prijedor which had been turned into concentration camps. After their arrest followed the incarceration of the Moslem and Catholic20men from Prijedor and its surroundings who had not yet fled. The most notorious concentration camps on the Nazi pattern, in the opinion of the Jewish American Pulitzer prize-winner, Roy Gutman, near Prijedor were those in Omrska, Keraterm, Manjaèa und Trnopolje. Above all in Omarska, which was known as a death-camp, the prisoners were every day and particularly brutally starved, badly mishandled, beaten asnd murdered. In Prijedor about 10,000 Bosniaks and Croats were liquidated. The search continues for 3,227 persons missing, whose remains are presumed to be in mass graves.

 

The work of the Society for Threatened Peoples International for Bosnia:

 

- 1991/1992 Documentation of Serb war crimes in East Slavonia with vigils and humanitarian initiatives

 

- 1992 Lists of names of approximately 25,000 persons murdered and 1,300 war criminals handed to the UN Investigation Committee of Cherif Bassiouni and later the Yugoslavia Tribunal in New York

 

- 1992-1995 Contact with surviving eye-witnesses of massacres, deportations, from concentration camps and rape camps and bombings provided for the national media in North America and Europe

 

- September 1992 Setting up of an international hearing in Frankfurt: "Ethnic cleansing” and mass deportation in Bosnia and Croatia =2 0with five experts in international law

 

- Contact maintained for years with radio hams in the encircled enclaves of Gorazde, Bihac and Zepa and international telephone conferences organized for them

 

- Spring 1993 Participation in Bosnia congress in New York initiated by Simon Wiesenthal

 

- June 1993 Vigil in front of the former concentration camp of Dachau supported by Simon Wiesenthal during the German Evangelical Congress (EKD): "Jews 1933 – Bosnian Moslems 1993 – EKD neutral!”

 

- June 1993 construction of a symbolic concentration camp together with Bosnian refugees at the first Human Rights Congress of the United Nations in Vienna

 

- July 1993 Arrest of Zülch and three other GfbV members on the

Jelacic Square

in Zagreb and in September 1993 occupation of the Croatian embassy in Bonn in protest against the invasion of Croatian troops into Bosnia

 

- December 1993 Organisation of a hunger-strike of six Bosnian women, former inmates of the Serb concentration camp Omarska

 

- February 1994 Occupation of the Greek stand at the tourist fair in Berlin against the support of Athens for Karadzic and Milosevic

 

- 1993-1996 Coordination of20the work of over 100 Bosnian associations of refugees and guest-workers

 

- April 1994 The largest demonstration outside Sarajevo in Bonn with 30,000 participants protesting against the genocide, with the later murdered Bosnian Foreign Minister Irfan Ljubijankic and Christian Schwarz-Schilling

 

- August 1995 Organisation of the only international congress on genocide in Bonn with 150 experts from four continents (patrons: Simon Wiesenthal, Rita Süssmuth, Haris Silajdzic)

 

- Autumn 1992 Publication of the first book on the genocide in Bosnia

 

- 14th November 1993 Appeal to public opinion throughout the world at the memorial site in Buchenwald together with survivors of the Serb concentration camps and the last leader of the freedom fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman

 

- 18th July 1995 Setting up of a cemetery in front of the villa of Bundeskanzler Kohl – seven days after the beginning of the mass murder in Srebrenica

 

- 27th July 1995 "Occupation” of the memorial site of Buchenwald with surviving Bosnian concentration camp inmates

 

- Arrest of Serb war criminals in Germany initiated

 

- August 1995 "Giving the victims a voice” – GfbV calls on WDR without success for Bosnian radio programmes for 360,000 refugees in Germany

 

- August 1995 Three days before the Croatian invasion of the Krajina immediate documentation of the expulsion of Croatian Serbs

 

- 1996 Organisation of an attempt at return to Prijedor together with refugees and 20 international journalists

 

- Interviews with surviving eye-witnesses of war crimes passed to large national newspapers and western TV stations

 

- Since 1996 Support for the associations of the genocide victims, the minorities, the inmates of the rape camps, the people returning to Srebrenica by contacts, counselling, the provision of logistic and humanitarian aid and meetings of peace initiatives.

 

The GfbV has had two offices in Sarajevo and Srebrenica since 1996. The national section has an advisory council of members of victims’ organisations and all ethnic and religious communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina . The federal office of the GfbV in Göttingen still maintains a South-East Europe Department. Support for people returning to Srebrenica and the 52 surrounding villages of the former UN protected zone, mobilisation of agricultural aid for the returning farmers and close cooperation with the Bosnian victims’ associations.

 

Tilman Zülch, President of the GfbV International, publisher of the first book in German " "Ethnische Säuberun g – Völkermord für Großserbien" (Ethnic cleansing – genocide for Greater Serbia), published in 1992 by Luchterhand, the texts of which caused Christian Schwarz-Schilling to resign from the government;

 

"Die Angst des Dichters vor der Wirklichkeit" (The poet’s fear of reality) on the public support of Peter Handke for Milosevic and Karadzic, published by Steidl in 1996;

 

Other documentary publications on the war and genocide in Bosnia .

 

Zülch was presented with the Silver Lily of the Bosnian Presidium in 1999, received the Srebrenica Award again st Genocide of the four mothers’ associations in 2006 and the "Sloboda” (Freedom) Prize of the Anti-War Centre Sarajevo in 2007. He is also an honorary member of the Association of Female Inmates of Concentration Camps in Sarajevo .