Dear Sir/Madam,

Our international human rights organisation is dismayed to learn of the rejection of an application for politcal asylum by Jovan Mirilo, the man whose courage provided the world with the evidence that mass murder had been committed at Srebrenica.

In Germany and Austria we continue to respect all those who opposed the National Socialists and we honour the memory of the victims.

When once again genocide was being perpetrated in the heart of Europe, this time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Serb troops against Bosnian Muslims, many people in Central Europe in particular were shocked, angered and horrified by the failure to help prevent it. As some people are anxious to deny the truth of all that happened I am appending a few facts about the genocide in Bosnia at the end of this open letter.

I myself was involved from the very start in documenting this war crime for Society for Threatened Peoples International, and I published the very first book written in German on the subject at the end of 1993. Earlier that year I submitted the very first list of approximately 25,000 murdered victims along with the names of more than 1300 individual perpetrators of war crimes to the [?add United Nations's] Bassiouni Commission in New York, the forerunner of the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. In the years since then I have time and again been present at exhumations of mass graves.

So that means that we are in a position to express an opinion about what Jovan Mirilo did. Neither his courage nor the significance of his actions can be exaggerated. Tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims were executed by firing squads or died as a result of mistreatment in the camps - it was thanks to Mirilo that for the first time the international public was able to see the videotaped proof.

There is no such thing as collective guilt, in this war crime or any other. Many [?Serbs and] Serbians sought to prevent the atrocities for which Karadzic, Milosevic and Mladic were responsible. They include General Divjak, the defender of of Sarajevo, Mirko Pejanovic, President of the Serb Citizens' Council of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Belgrade human rights defenders Sonja Biserko and Natasa Kandic, the "Women in Black", the Helsinki Committee [?add for Human Rights in Serbia] and thousands of other Serbian citizens. At the same time thousands of Bosnian Serbs fell victim to artillery bombardment and sniper fire during the siege of the Bosnian capital.

With their deplorable and irresponsible rejection of Jovan Mirilo's application for political asylum the Austrian authorities have not only shown themselves to be unmoved by the prospect of his death, they have also tarnished the memory of that unforgettable response shown in so many different ways by the hundreds of thousands of Austrians, politicians and parliamntarians included, who came to the assistance of besieged, persecuted and threatened Bosniaks during the war.

Die Anzeige dieses Bildes wird in Ihrem Browser möglicherweise nicht unterstützt. I urge you to do everything in your power to ensure that Jovan Mirilo is allowed to remain in Austria as a political refugee.

Yours sincerely,

Tilman Zülch

President, Society for Threatened Peoples International