International Criminal Tribunal delivers its verdict on Radovan Karadzic

"The most monumental crime committed by Radovan Karadži? was the bloody partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina using every violent means possible - genocide, mass expulsion and mass rape.  Karadzic shares responsibility with Slobodan Miloševi?, President of the Former Yugoslavia, for Bosnia's dismemberment", according to Society for Threatened Peoples International (STP-I) President Tilman Zülch, speaking on Thursday as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia  in The Hague delivered its verdict in the case of the leader of the Bosnian Serbs.   Zülch insists that "Genocide must not be rewarded. Unless we want to hand victory to the perpetrators, the international community must act to ensure that Bosnia is reunited. And that means Serbia too accepting its share of responsibility. It was the former Serbian head of government, President of the former Republic of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic, who used the forces under Karadzic's command to bring death, suffering and poverty to their Muslim compatriots across the whole of Bosnia."

Ahead of publication of the Tribunal's judgment STP mounted a vigil in The Hague in front of the International Criminal Tribunal with large banners calling for Bosnia's reunification and commemorating the death of 8372 murdered inhabitants of Srebrenica. The international human rights organisation recalled details of a genocide that took place in Europe in the closing years of the 20th century - over 20,000 Bosnian women victims of mass rape, more than 100 concentration and rape camps established by the Serb forces, many thousands of detainees perished in the camps. "Over the course of the war Europe left more than 150,000 Bosnians to die", Zülch claimed, condemning the countries of the West for their years of inactivity "Members of the Bosnian intellectual elite were systematically murdered and some 500,000 Bosnians in so-called UN "safe areas" were starved and shot at.  The Serb bombardment of Sarajevo caused 11,000 deaths in the besieged city, among them those of 1500 children. 1189 mosques and madrassas were systematically destroyed along with more than 500 Catholic churches and other religious buildings."

The warning voices of Jewish Holocaust survivors were ignored:

Speaking at the former Buchenwald concentration camp in 1994, Marek Edelman, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters, warned, "Europe has learned nothing from the Holocaust. Nothing has been done to stop this slaughter.  What is happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a posthumous triumph for Hitler".

In 1993 Simon Wiesenthal observed in Bonn that "As I learned from reports about the  crimes committed by Karadži? and Mladi?, I became firmly convinced that these individuals must be held to account, just as the Nazi criminals were after the end of the  Second World War."

Henry Siegman, President of the American Jewish Congress, asked his President Bill Clinton in an open letter published in the New York Times,

"If remembering the victims of the Holocaust does not move us to respond to the suffering in Bosnia, what conceivable purpose does such remembrance serve?“

"Between 1992 and 1995 the Serb government of Serbia and Montenegro in association with Karadzic's military forces used war and genocide to overwhelm and destroy the internationally recognised sovereign state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and  through mass expulsions from half of that country's territory brought about the creation of the so-called Republika Srpska", Zülch maintained, arguing that, "the partition of Bosnia was imposed by the major powers - the USA, Russia, France, Great Britain and a recently reunified Germany - through the Dayton peace agreement of 1995. The great majority of war criminals have found refuge for themselves in Republika Srpska. They have made a peaceful and prosperous life for themselves there.  The perpetrators have been rewarded and the victims punished. Over a million Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Bosnian Catholic refugees have been unable to return home. This outcome is a cause of shame for Europe as a whole and will remain so unless and until partition is reversed and a reunited Bosnia and Herzegovina is admitted to the European Union."

Header Photo: STP Archive