"Prosecutors have failed!"

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) is astonished about the fact that the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has acquitted the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of a charge of genocide in the Bosnian municipalities of Bratunac, Foca, Kljuc, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik. On Thursday, Tilman Zülch – the STP's Secretary General – criticized this as a "failure of the prosecutors in The Hague", who could obviously not provide enough evidence against Karadzic, although the list of atrocities committed by his forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina is long.

According to the STP, Karadzic's troops had kept up concentration and rape camps in the eastern Bosnian municipalities of Bratunac, Foca, Zvornik and Vlasenica for months. Thousands of prisoners were executed or tortured to death alone in the area around Prijedor, in the concentration camps of Trnopolje, Omarska, Keratern and Manjaca. There were also camps where mass rapes took place. Hundreds of Bosnian civilians fell victim to massacres carried out by Karadzic's militia in the cities of Kljuc and Sanski Most. Many of the Bosnians who managed to escape from Bratunac, Zvornik and Vlasenica to Srebrenica became victims of the mass-execution of 1995, during which 8,372 people were killed. All Islamic and Catholic houses of worship in these regions were completely destroyed.

"Our human rights organization has documented the crimes of the Serbian army and the militias in Bosnia-Herzegovina since April 6, 1992 – since the beginning of the war in Bosnia – and has published numerous reports since 1992," said Zülch. "It can not be denied that Radovan Karadzic also committed acts of genocide in the mentioned communities, meaning acts with an "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."