19th Anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement (November 21, 1995)

19 years after the horrific mass murder of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and women in Srebrenica and two decades after the first genocide in Europe since the Second World War, the Society for Threatened Peoples recalls that reunified Germany and the western powers are partly responsible for the crimes committed against the Muslim Bosniaks. According to estimates by the STP, up to 150.000 children, women and men were massacred by Serbian troops, martyred in hundreds of concentration and rape camps, got killed in bombings or died as a consequence of flight and expulsion between 1992 and 1995. The citizens of Sarajevo had to endure almost four years of merciless bombardments and the destruction of their city.

Several Jewish representatives – among them Simon Wiesenthal, Marek Edelman, Elie Wiesel, Susan Sonntag, Alain Finkielkraut, Roy Gutman, Bernard Kouchner, and others – had declared the crimes in Bosnia to be genocide crimes and had called for Western intervention, but the European governments had chosen to stand back and watch the crimes of the Serbian troops for quite a while. During the war, Marek Edelman, former commander of the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, had criticized: "Europe has learnt nothing from the Holocaust, Bosnia is a posthumous victory for Hitler."

On October 25, 1994, Simon Wiesenthal – who also supported the human rights work of the Society for Threatened Peoples – recalled that the crimes in Auschwitz had also been ignored at that time. He stated: "Now, the world is not doing enough to stop the ethnic cleansing, the systematic rape of women and young girls, the slaughter of innocents, the atrocities that are adding up to genocide crimes – for the same reasons: cowardice, callousness and a lack of moral empathy in the Western world."

The Society for Threatened Peoples points out that Germany, freshly reunited, did nothing to stop the war in Bosnia either. Chancellor Kohl's government had watched the incredible suffering of the Bosnian population for almost four years before eventually signing the Dayton Agreement, dividing the country and leaving a third of Bosnia to the Serbian extremists. Thus, about 1.5 million refugees and displaced persons were unable to return to their hometowns.

Tilman Zülch (Honorary Citizen of Sarajevo and Winner of the Srebrenica Prize) is available for further questions: +49 (0) 551 49906 31 or politik@gfbv.de.

Header Photo: © Akif Sahin/Flickr