EU and USA accused: the Dayton Agreement is responsible for the desperate political situation in Bosnia

On the eve of tomorrow's meeting in Sarajevo at which US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, representing the European Union, will discuss the current desperate political emergency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Society for Threatened Peoples International (STP) has accused the EU and the US, along with former German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President Jacques Chirac, of having knowingly brought about the situation that has led to Friday's emergency meeting by their negotiation of the 1995 Dayton Agreement.

Rather than restore the territorial integrity of a country with a 500 year tradition of multireligious co-existence, they allowed it to be reconfigured by the perpetrators of war and genocide. The territory of the entity of Republika Srpska, unlawfully seized by the war criminal Radovan Karadzic, was awarded to those who had been responsible for the mass expulsion and displacement of the non-Serb population, mass rapes, concentration, internment and rape camps, mass slaughter - Srebrenica and many other massacres - and the starvation and bombardment of five UN safe areas. The International Court of Justice and the UN Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague have both found the Republika Srpska Army and Police guilty of genocide.

STP also accuses the Dayton signatories of failing to take any meaningful steps to ensure the comprehensive return home of Republika Srpska's non-Serb population. 60 per cent were expelled during the genocide, only six per cent have so far managed to return.

Society for Threatened Peoples is calling for:

a) the abolition of the two entities of Republika Srpska and the Bosnian-Croat Federation, and the creation of a regionally-based system of government, rationally organised according to economic, historical and geographical principles.

b) amendment of the electoral legislation to allow citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to choose representatives other than members of their own ethnic group.

c) an end to the partition of the city of Sarajevo.

d) the dismissal and trial of all suspected war criminals working for or holding positions of authority in the legal system, police and government institutions of Republika Srpska and the arrest of Serb commander Ratko Mladic and his delivery by Serbia to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

e) a new returns programme aimed at ensuring that all refugees and expulsees are able to return to their places of origin.

f) timely admission of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the EU and the inclusion of the country's citizens in proposed visa regime liberalisation arrangements.

For further information please contact the President of STP-International, Tilman Zülch at politik@gfbv.de