Göttingen, 05. Februar 2010

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

Some facts concerning the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina:

1. More than 200,000 civilians detained in over one hundred concentration and internment camps.

2. Thousands of prisoners killed in concentration camps including Omarska, Manjaca, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Luka Brcko, Susica and Foca [?accents/diacritics]

3. Systematic detention and murder of members of the academic and political [?social, political, economic and academic] elites.

4. 2.2 million Bosnians refugees and deportees scattered to the four corners of the globe.

5. Thousands of unrecorded and uncounted deaths during and after the expulsion [?during and after ethnic cleansing], including children, the elderly and the sick and injured.

6. 500,000 Bosnians besieged, starved and bombarded for nearly four years in the UN's so-called "safe areas" ((Sarajevo, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Zepa, ?Cerska / Tuzla and Bihac), with many thousands killed.

7. Some 11,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo, including 1500 children, killed during almost four years under fire,

8. Massacres and mass executions perpetrated in many of the towns and cities of northern, western and eatsern Bosnia (the Posavina, the Prijedor region and the Drina Valley).

9. Systematic destruction of hundreds of villages and parts of towns.

10. Total destruction of all material aspects of Muslim culture including 1347 mosques and madrassas and and widespread destruction of Catholic cultural minuments including as many as 500 churches and other religious institutions.

11. 15,000 individuals still missing, awaiting location of the bodies, exhumation and identification.

12. Hostage-taking and mistreatment of 284 UN soldiers used as human shields

13. More than 20.000 Bosnian Muslim women raped in the rape camps and elsewhere

14. At least 8,373 men and boys from the town of Srebrenica murdered and buried in mass graves in July 1995.