The Federal Government urged to declare 11 July a day of commemoration for Srebrenica - human rights activists and action artists recall the political failure of 1995

The German Federal Government should declare 11 July a day of commemoration for the 8376 victims of the genocide at Srebrenica. In Berlin on Saturday Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV) / Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) issued this demand in the course of a commemorative event organised jointly with action artist Philipp Ruch in front of the the Reichstag building, home of the German Federal Parliament. GfbV/STP President Tilman Zülch recalled how German political parties - CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, Greens and PDS - had all refused to support military Intervention to save the victims of genocide in Bosnia. They must bear their share of responsibility for the suffering endured by the Bosnian Muslims.

With few exceptions most German politicians stood by and watched as cities, towns and UN-protected safe areas in Bosnia were besieged and bombarded by Serb troops, their inhabitants terrorised by sniper fire, thousands of Bosnian Muslim women tortured in rape camps and tens of thousands of refugees detained in concentration and internment camps, Zülch recalled. As a result hundreds of thousands of Bosnians were expelled from their homes or forced to flee "ethnic cleansing". GfbV/STP invited representatives of all political parties to attend the memorial event at which a 60-metre long banner carrying the names of the individuals murdered at Srebrenica was displayed.

Germany should now provide help for the survivors as well as bringing pressure to bear on Serbia to hand over the senior war criminal General Ratko Mladi? to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague (ICTY), Zülch insisted. In addition the Federal Government should campaign to secure special political status for Srebrenica within Bosnia and support for return and reconstruction projects specifically identified by Germany and the EU. The town of Srebrenica and the surrounding villages which are now located within a Serb-administered part of Bosnia find themselves in a desperate situation.

In front of the Reichstag building action artists re-enacted the meeting of the UN Crisis Staff on 10 July 1995 at which it was decided to allow the UN safe area of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia to be handed over to Serb forces without any opposition and not to deploy UN troops in defence of the town. The Serb general Ratko Mladi? was allowed to march into the town at the head of his troops and, under the eyes of UN soldiers, separate 8376 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the women and younger children and murder them. The corpses were buried in mass graves. To conceal the evidence the bodies were later dug up again, often using bulldozers, and reburied a second and third time. To date approximately 6200 of the bodies exhumed from 275 mass graves in the Drina Valley have been identified.

The Srebrenica commemoration event received support from Islamisches Kulturzentrum der Bosniaken - IKB (Bosniak Islamic Culture Centre), Kultur- und Wissenschaftsnetzwerk - ZZI (Culture and Science Network) and Südost Europa Kultur e.V. (South-Eastern Europe Culture).