Break the silence on the complicity of France and Great Britain in the genocide in Bosnia!

On the occasion of the 16th anniversary of the massacre of Srebrenica, the STP appeals to media, the public and politicians to break the silence that has long surrounded the complicity of the French and British governments in the genocide in Bosnia and Srebrenica. It is equally important to recognize the failure of the Kohl/Kinkel government in Germany at that time. 

According to the human rights organization the administrations of Francois Mitterrand and John Major supported the war of aggression waged by the Serbian army and Serbian militias against Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 to 1995. French, British and Canadian high commanders of the UN troops on site aided and abetted the attacking Serbian troops in many ways, and failed to prevent continuous attacks on civilian targets.

Human rights activist Simon Wiesenthal, former commander of the freedom fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Marek Edelman, Elie Wiesel, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Susan Sontag and André Glucksmann repeatedly criticized Europe's silence or complicity at the time, demanding that lessons be learnt from the Holocaust. The STP, too, whose work has been supported by most of the people named above, made grave accusations: "It is not right that Germans and Europeans lament and "process" only that genocide which took place in the past while refusing to recognize the genocide that is happening today." On July 11, 1995, Serbian troops invaded Srebrenica and murdered 8,372 Bosniaks who had sought refuge in the so-called UN "safe zone."

The Kohl/Kinkel government did nothing. Rather than calling for intervention, they demanded a weapons embargo for the region – at a time when Serbia had access to the entire Yugoslavian arms industry while the besieged of Sarajevo, Bihac, Tuzla, Gorazde, Zepa and Srebrenica had only meager stores of weapons at their disposal.

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) appeals to:

the European Commission, the European Union, the European Council, NATO, and also the US and the United Nations to put and end to the de facto partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina that was orchestrated in Dayton as a result of the war of aggression, genocide and mass flight of populations, and furthermore to establish functioning institutions for the entire territory of the country to bring about a genuine reunification on the recent German model.