Tilman Zülch, founder and president of the Society for Threatened Peoples International, will be 70 this coming Wednesday.

Born on 02.09.1939 in German Libau, North Moravia (Sudetenland), flight to East Holstein in January 1945, 1955-60 member of the Bündische Jugend, 1960 Abitur at the Gymnasium Louisenlund, 1961 – 1968 studied economics and politics in Graz, Heidelberg and Hamburg, 1963 deputy chair of the SHB (Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund), 1968 founding of the campaign "Biafra-Hilfe” in Hamburg against the genocide against the Ibos and stay in Biafra (January/February 1969). In 1970 out of the "Biafra-Hilfe” arose the "Society for Threatened Peoples”, since 1978 with its international office in Göttingen, member of the Jury of the Weimar Human Rights Prize. The chief concern of the Society for Threatened Peoples is the work for communities which are persecuted for ethnic or religious reasons in all political systems and on all continents. The human rights organisation fights against genocide, ethnocide, expulsion and racism. It works for the return "in dignity” of people who have been driven out and the full integration of endangered political refugees in the countries taking them. One of the principles of the GfbV, today a large human rights organisation, has always been, in accordance with its guide-line: "Not blind on either eye”, its political and ideological independence, which is guaranteed among other things by over 25,000 members, supporters and donors. The Society for Threatened Peoples International has had since 1993 advisory status at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations and since 1955 participatory status at the Council of Europe. It has national sections and offices in Switzerland (Berne), Luxembourg, Austria (Vienna), Italy (Bolzano/Bozen in South Tyrol), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo and Srebrenica), Germany (Göttingen and Berlin) and Arbil (Kurdistan/Iraq) and representatives in USA, Great Britain and in Kosovo.

The Society for Threatened Peoples has been supported from early on by people like Ernst Bloch, Helmut Gollwitzer, Günter Grass, Paul Celan, Robert Jungk, Martin Walser, Simon Wiesenthal, Ernst Tugendhat, Simone Veil, Freimut Duve, Rupert Neudeck, den Bischöfen Kurt Scharf und Heinrich Tenhumberg and later by many others like Marek Edelman, Alfred Grosser, Johannes Rau, Rita Süssmuth, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, Erika Steinbach, Jovan Divjak, Mustafa Reis-ul-Ulema Ceric, Mirko Pejanovic, Smajil Cekic, Stjepan Kljujic, Ralph Giordano and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Zülch understands human rights work as work for persecuted minorities. Standing up for people who are persecuted for ethnic and religious reasons is an obligation, above all for Germany and Austria arising not at least out of the Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. "Auschwitz”, said Heinrich Böll in March 1970 after a conversation with Zülch about Biafra, "Must not be a brake, but must be the reason for brotherliness.” Coming to terms with the past in Germany, according to Zülch, must however not lead to repressing other historical crimes like those of Stalinism, Maoism, of European colonialism and also the mass expulsion of Germans after 1945 and tabooing today’s genocides. From the early 1970s to the present day the GfbV has under Zülch’s leadership documented the crimes of genocide in Tibet, East Bengal, East Timor, West Papua-New Guinea, against the Amazon Indians, the Kurds and the Assyrian Christians of North Iraq, in South Sudan, in East Slavonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and today in Darfur. The GfbV has stood up for the victims and supported their demands. To highlight the situation of the Indian nations the human rights organisation organised in 1977/78 already the first large tour of Germany of Indian delegates from 16 American states from Canada to Argentina.

With the publication of the first book since the end of the war on the long tabooed genocide against Sinti and Roma and a three-year campaign Zülch started in the period 1979-1982 a comprehensive report in the German-language media on this Nazi crime, moved President Carstens and the German Chancellor Schmidt to public recognition of the Nazi crimes against the German and European "gipsies”, gave the impetus for the first pension solution as compensation for the years of persecution of members of the ethnic minority, established the proper names "Sinti” and "Roma”, initiating the restoration of civic rights of members of these minorities from the former German eastern provinces and subventions for the Sinti and Roma offices operated by themselves, which exist in most of the German provinces today. The Sinti civil rights movement arising out of this human rights work in 1979 has continued this work.

Following years of work of the Society for Threatened Peoples for oppressed Jewish, Crimean Tartars, Volga-Germans and dissidents in the Soviet Union also, against genocide and expulsion in Afghanistan and against Soviet arms deliveries to military dictatorships in the Third World Zülch was forbidden entry to the GDR from 1985 to 1989. In his Stasi file Zülch and the Society for Threatened Peoples were accused of subversive activity against the GDR. No less absurd was the observation of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Hamburg (1973-1978) with the note that black-African "Communists” had infiltrated the human rights organisation. The south Sudanese and Biafran GfbV members had however become refugees and victims of Soviet arms deliveries to the governments of their home countries.

Zülch has been publisher of the magazine "pogrom” since 1970, the largest specialist journal on the situation of ethnic and religious minorities and indigenous peoples (circulation today. 5,000). The magazine is reaching its 40th birthday.

In December 1989 he initiated the founding of the GfbV DDR in East Berlin, at which also representatives of the Sorb minority and many long-standing friends of the human rights organisation took part, who were now allowed to work there officially. In January and March 1990 he published a documentation on the killing of about 60,000 Germans in the concentration camps and internment camps of the Soviet Occupied Zone (1945-1950), which was widely reported in the media of the then GDR and in leading West German daily newspapers and magazines.

In the years 1987/88 and 1990/91 Zülch worked together with Alexander von Sternberg against arms deliveries to Iraq, above all by the Hessian firms of Pilot Plant and Karl Kolb, which were involved in the building-up of an Iraqi poison gas industry. In August 1987 the GfbV was threatened by the provincial court in Bonn with a fine of DM 500,000 should it make itself guilty of "repeated libel” of the two firms. Forbidden was the statement that they had made possible the destruction of Kurdish and Assyrian Aramaic village communities. The judgement of this court was later reversed by the Higher Regional Court in Bonn. The managers of the firms responsible were later detained in custody for three years pending trial. In September 1990 Zülch discovered the breach of the arms embargo against Iraq by the MBB company. The GfbV has consistently opposed German arms deliveries to dictatorships and to regions of war and genocide.

Since April 1991 Zülch has expended particular energy on behalf of the victims of war of aggression and genocide in East Slavonia, Bosnia, Krajina, Kosovo and at the present time for the Kosovar Roma, who are being persecuted by Albanian extremists. He published the first book to appear in western countries on the genocide against the Bosnian Moslems, the first draft of which was referred to by the then German Minister for Post and Telecommunications when he handed in his resignation against the Bosnian policies of the German government. In 1999 Zülch published for the GfbV documentations on the genocide against the Kosovo Albanians and on the expulsion of the Roma and Ashkali in Kosovo. This publication raised an international echo for Bosnia from 1992 until 1995 throughout Europe and North America. The GfbV is at the present time conducting a human rights campaign against the deportation of refugees and their children who have lived for many years in Germany.

HONOURS

1982: Geo Environment Prize

1993: Honorary Membership of the Bund Stalinistischer Verfolgter e.V. (the league of persons persecuted under the Stalin regime), (province of Sachsen-Anhalt)

1996: Lower Saxon Prize for Publishing, presented by Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder

1996: Silver Medal with crest of the (multi-ethnic) Executive Committee of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, bestowed by the President Alija Izetbegovic

2001: Honorary membership of the Society of Female camp prisoners of Bosnia and Herzegovina

2001: Medal of the Year of the "Bund der Vertriebenen" (BDV) "For work for the human rights of expelled Germans”

2002: Bundesverdienstkreuz (Cross of Merit)

2003: Human Rights Prize of the "Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft” (Sudeten German Homeland Association) (awarded for the first time in 2002 to Emile Schindler)

2003: Göttingen Peace Prize for "Recognition of his Life-work"

2006: "Srebrenica Award against Genocide" 2006

2006: Human Rights Prize "Sloboda” (Freedom) of the Anti-War Centre – Sarajevo

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

* Biafra, Todesurteil für ein Volk? (Death Sentence for a People?), together with Klaus Guercke, Lettner Verlag Berlin 1968, foreword by Golo Mann

* Von denen keiner spricht. Verfolgte Minderheiten (People No one Mentions, Persecuted Monorities), Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979

* In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt - zur Situation der Sinti und Roma in Europa,(Gassed in Auschwitz, Persecuted to the Present Day – on the Situtaion of the Sinti and Roma in Europe) Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979, foreword by Ernst Tugendhat

* Die "Zigeuner", verkannt, verachtet, verfolgt”;(The "Gipsies", Misjudged, Despised and Persecuted), together with Donald Kenrick und Grattan Puxon, Lower Saxon Office for Political Education, Hannover 1980

* Aufstand der Opfer - Verratene Völker zwischen Hitler und Stalin

(Rebellion of the Victims – Betrayed Peoples between Hitler and Stalin), together with Johannes Vollmer, pogrom Taschenbücher, Göttingen 1996,

* Völkermord an den Kurden (Genocide Against the Kurds), Luchterhand, Hamburg/Zürich 1991

* Genozid im Irak - Verfolgung und Vernichtung von Kurden und assyrischen Christen 1968 bis 1990 (Genocide in Iraq – Persecution and Extermination of the Kurds and Assyrian Christians from 1968 to 1990), together with Inse Geismar, Human rights Report of the GfbV, Göttingen 1991

* "Ethnische Säuberungen" - Völkermord für Großserbien" (Ethnic Cleansing – Genocide for Greater Serbia), Luchterhand, Hamburg/Zürich 1993 / "Etnicko ciscenje" - Genocid za "Veliku Srbiju", Sarajevo 1996

* Die Angst des Dichters vor der Wirklichkeit, 16 Antworten auf Peter Handkes "Winterreise nach Serbien" (The Poet’s Fear of Reality, 16 Replies to Peter Handke’s ‘Winterreise nach Serbien’), Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 1996 / Pjesnikov Strah od stvarnosti - 16 odgovora na P. Handkeovo "Zimsko Putovanje u Srbiju", Sarajevo 1997, Vijece Kongresa bosnjackih intelektualaca i institut za istrazivanje zlocina protiv covjecnosti i medunarodnog prava

* Bis der letzte "Zigeuner" das Land verlassen hat - Massenvertreibung der Roma und Aschkali aus dem Kosovo (Until the Last "Gipsy” has Left the Country – Mass expulsion of the Roma and Ashkali from Kosovo) with an appeal by Günter Grass; Human Rights Report of the GfbV, Göttingen 1999

* 40 Jahre Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, Von Biafra bis Darfur (40 Years Society for Threatened Peoples, From Biafra to Darfur) bedrohte Völker-pogrom, Göttingen 2008

Tilman Zülch can be reached at politik@gfbv.de