Serbia’s former dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, is dead. His project remains successful

Found dead in his cell, Serbia’s former dictator Slobodan Milosevic escapes his conviction. However, his project of ethnic cleansing, designed to destroy the eight-hundred-year-old Bosnia-Herzegovina, has survived. Bosnia is de facto a divided country. In Dayton, the United States of America and Europe gave half of the territory to Milosevic’s followers. Most of the non-Serbs who were displaced from their home country have not been able to return and are scattered on four continents.

Milosevic’s name continues to be associated with the first European concentration and rape camps, the first acts of mass expulsion, the first air raids of European cities and towns, and the first massacres since the horrors of the 1940s. Milosevic created the term „ethnic cleansing”, which has superseded the term „genocide” in the international media coverage.

For four years, Europe regarded the war criminal Slobodan Milosevic as a negotiating partner. Two European heads of government, John Major and Francois Mitterand availed his policy of ethnic cleansing.

Mostly Bosnia’s tolerant Muslims fell victim to the genocide that had been initiated by Milosevic. 1.186 of their mosques and madrasas were destroyed. Europe never gave the multi-ethnic Bosnia a chance. Serbs and Croats who stood up for a united Bosnia were let down. Men like General Divjak, the Bosnian Serb defender of Sarajevo, Mirko Pejanovic, the head of the Serbian Civic Council (recipient of the Alternative Nobel Price), Miro Lazovic, head of the Bosnian Parliament, Ivo Komsic and Stjepan Kljuic, both members of the Bosnia Croatia committee, were not listened to.

Germany’s government and political parties also failed the people of Bosnia and eventually deported 50 000 Bosnian refugees to North America and Australia, knowing that they could not return to their war-torn home country. Only a few members of the German Bundestag argued for a military intervention in order to put an end to the war of aggression and genocide in Bosnia.

Human Rights Work for Bosnia-Herzegovina

Since the aggression of Serbia-Montenegro against the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Society for Threatened Peoples International has spoken out on behalf of the Bosnian victims. By June 1992, we were already referring to the crimes that were being committed against the Bosnian civilian population as genocide. We have provided the German and the international media – press, radio, and television – with a constant supply of information concerning mass killings, mass expulsions, deportations, concentration camps, and wholesale devastation. We recorded the testimony of eye witnesses and maintained radio contact with Bosnian towns and cities under siege. We have made documents and information available to the UN committees of experts inquiring into war crimes and genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague and the Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany. We have organised international conferences with experts and politicians, conducted public hearings of evidence and held vigils and demonstrations for an undivided Bosnia. We have encouraged relief agencies, churches and private initiatives to provide humanitarian assistance. On 6 February 1994 we launched the European Forum for Bosnia-Herzegovina, bringing together more than 100 associations and clubs of Bosnian exiles in order to achieve a more effective dialogue with the European public.