On Sunday 11 July 2010, the 15th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, Center for Political Beauty will assemble a mound of 16,744 shoes in front of the Brandenburg Gate in commemoration of the 8372 victims of the crime of genocide perpetrated by Serb forces in eastern Bosnia in 1995. The shoes, the majority collected by the Bosnian, Austrian and German offices of Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), will be used in one year's time to construct a "Pillar of Shame" in the form of the 8 metre-high characters "U" and "N" (for "United Nations") at the Srebrenica Memorial Center and Cemetery in Potocari, in time for the 2011 anniversary.

STP is supporting this project which is intended to serve as a permanent reminder of the U.N.'s failure. However our human rights organisation is emphatic that the blame for the genocide perpetrated in Bosnia over a period of years must be borne above all by three Permanent Members of the U.N.'s Security Council - France, the United Kingdom and Russia. It was not the majority of member states from the developing world represented at the U.N. who failed to prevent the genocide, rather, and above all, it was these three major powers. Today they try to conceal their support for Serbia's military aggression and their unwillingness to take action against Serbian war criminals by hiding behind the collective identity of the UN.

Europe has built its own de facto "Wall of Shame" around Bosnia. The country of the victims of the war remains partitioned. Half, the so-called Republika Srpska, is still ruled by the party of the perpetrators of genocide. Attempts by refugees and the displaced to return to home continue to be thwarted, again because the Permanent Members of the Security Council never made any genuine effort to achieve it. It is Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country of the victims, which is now denied admission to the European Union, just as its citizens are refused the easing of visa restrictions. Movement on admission to NATO has stalled and there is no progress towards reconstruction or reunion.

STP findis it incomprehensible that the Merkel/Westerwelle government is one of those supporting Serbia, in spite of the absence of any serious attempt to deliver Ratko Mladic, the most wanted senior war criminal, to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. In its day the Kohl/Kinkel government opposed military intervention to end the genocide, was a constant advocate of an arms embargo that penalised only the defendants of the besieged Bosnian populations of Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Bihac, and put its signature to the Dayton Agreement that divided Bosnia in two.

It is time for Germans and Europeans to tear down this wall of shame imprisoning Bosnia.