Memorial ceremony in Berlin for 8372 victims of Srebrenica - human rights campaigners recall how genocide claimed the lives of 150,000 Bosnians

At a wreath-laying ceremony on Tuesday at the Neue Wache memorial to the victims of wars and despotism in Berlin, Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) / Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV) will be comemorating the 8372 victims of Srebrenica in Bosnia, among them more than 1000 young people and 510 women. At the commemoration ceremony the human rights organisation will also recall how that the genocidal crimes committed at Srebrenica on 11 July 1995 were only part of a terrible genocide perpetrated by Serb soldiers and militia across the whole of Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. Thousands of detainees were tortured and killed in concentration and rape camps and besieged towns and cities were bombarded by artillery for years on end as their inhabitants starved in the campaign of so-called ethnic cleansing that forced 22 million Bosnians to become refugees. That genocide cost the lives of some 150,000 people. Bosnia and Herzegovina is today a de facto partitioned nation and prospects for the return of refugees to their homes in the Serb-controlled northern half of the country are extremely limited.

"The governments of Great Britain and France openly aided and abetted the Serbian aggression throughout those four years. But the German government of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel must also bear a considerable share of the blame“, observed STP/GfbV's General Secretary Tilman Zülch. "At a time when Serbia had all the resources of the former Yugoslavia's armaments industry at its disposal to deploy against the feeble weaponry of the defenders of Sarajevo and Srebrenica during four-year-long sieges, the Federal Government was calling for an arms embargo across the region whose only impact was on the victims. They obstructed any military Intervention aimed at halting the genocide and ultimately preventing the slaughter at Srebrenica.“

"Europe has learned nothing from the Holocaust. Nothing has been done to end the killing“, said the late Marek Edelman, commander of the Warsw Ghetto resistance fighters; "what has happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a posthumous triumph for Hitler.“ Other prominent Jewish personalities, among them Elie Wiesel, Roy Gutman, Simon Wiesenthal, Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henryi Lévy called on the West to intervene to end the genocide. The Jewish-American journalist and theatre director Susan Sontag declared, "I have lost my faith in Western ideals. What is happening here in Bosnia is a knife blow for Western democracy and a stab in the heart for me“.

On Wednesday (11 July) at the Potocari memorial cemetery at Srebrenica the mortal remains of 520 more victims of murder will be laid to rest, among them three 15-year-olds and a 94-year-old woman. 5137 Srebrenica victims have already been buried in the cemetery at Potocari. More than 7000 victims from Srebrenica have been exhumed from mass graves, of whom 6600 have been identified by DNA analysis.

Facts about the Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992-1995

1. More than 200,000 civilians were detained in over 100 concentration, internment and rape camps

2. Thousands of prisoners were murdered in concentration camps such as Omarska, Manjaca, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brcko, Sušica and Foca

3. Intellectual and political leaders were systematically arrested and killed ("eliticide").

4. 2.2 million Bosnian refugees were scattered around the world.

5. Many thousands of children, the elderly, the sick and the injured and incapacitated met their deaths during and as a result of expulsion and flight.

6. 500,000 Bosnians starved, shelled and many of them killed over a period of nearly four years in the besieged UN "safe areas" of Tuzla, Goražde, Srebrenica, Žepa and Bihac.

7. 1500 children were among more than 11,000 killed in the sixth UN "safe area" of Sarajevo, under artillery and sniper fire for nearly four years.

8. Massacres and mass executions took place in many of the towns and municipalities of northern, western and eastern Bosnia (the Posavina, the Prijedor area and the Podrinje).

9. Hundreds of towns and villages were systematically attacked and destroyed.

10. 1189 mosques and medresas were demolished as part of the comprehensive destruction of the country's Islamic cultural heritage, the widespread destruction of Catholic cultural monuments included as many as 500 Catholic churches and other religious establishments, and in Serb areas 38 Orthodox churches were destroyed.

11. Approximately 15,000 individuals are still missing or their remains awaiting exhumation and identification.

12. 284 UN soldiers were taken hostage and used as human shields.

13. More than 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women were raped in rape camps and elsewhere.

14. 8372 Bosniaks from the town of Srebrenica, the majority men and boys but also including 510 women, were murdered and buried in mass graves

15. Around 150,000 deaths caused by "ethnic cleansing" and its consequences.