"Germany has a special responsibility" - Federal Government and aid agencies must provide fast emergency relief for Bosnia

Given the severe flooding in the Balkans, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) sent an urgent appeal to the German Federal Government to immediately provide extensive emergency relief for Bosnia. The human rights organization also sent a request to the German aid agencies to agree on a joint donations account for Bosina, following the example of the efforts for the victims of the Elbe flood a year ago. "After all the suffering caused by war, the people must be helped as fast as possible," is what the STP's General Secretary, Tilman Zülch, wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday. "The country will not be able to cope with any more destruction. Please do everything in your power to try to mitigate the consequences of this natural disaster!" 

Zülch emphasized that Germany has a particular responsibility for the survivors of the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which 150.000 Bosniaks had fallen victim to. "Under Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Klaus Kinkel, the Federal Government simply watched the crimes of the Serbian troops for years. Germany, reunited only a few years before, had signed the Dayton Peace Agreement and is thus jointly responsible for the division of Bosnia and the expulsion of more than one million non-Serb people. "During the war, Germany had taken up 360,000 refugees from Bosnia, but had forced them to leave Germany again after the war. Hundreds of thousands of people who could not return to the Serb-dominated north of the country were forced to emigrate to Australia or North America. 

From Sarajevo, the Bosnian section of the STP reported that Bosnia and Herzegovina are now suffering from the worst flooding in 150 years. Many of the towns and villages in parts of the country have been hit hard. The rivers broke their banks in Sarajevo, Visoko, Travnik, Zenica, Zavidovici, Maglaj, Doboj, Brcko, Travnik, Banja Luka, Tuzla, Kladanj, Bijeljina, Srebrenica, Bratunac and Visegrad, among others. Many places are cut off from the outside world and the people often have no electricity or drinking water. In the more highly situated areas, several landslides also tore down houses. Many people were inured. 

Tilman Zülch - Secretary General - is available for further questions: Tel. 0551 49 906 24 or politik@gfbv.de