Patriarch Pavel escapes "earthly judgment"

The Serb Orthodox Patriarch Pavle I. has died at the age of 96.

He was hailed as a "Man of the Ökumene by the Pope and as a "Man of Peace” by the German Catholic Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, but the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) regrets that the Serb Orthodox Patriarch has escaped from earthly judgment. "Pavle”, said the Chairperson of the STP, Tilman Zülch, "kept up a close friendship with the two main war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, when they had kept over 200,000 Bosnian Moslems and Catholics in concentration and internment camps and had 20,000 Bosnian Moslem women systematically raped by the Serb militia”. The Patriarch never raised his voice when Serb troops under the command of the two war criminals destroyed mosques and madrasas (a total of 1,186) and more than 500 Catholic churches and parish halls.

In the whole of Serb-occupied Bosnia just one single mosque remained untouched. Pavle, who on many occasions gave his blessing to the chief war criminals, later covered up these aspects of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina by vague and noncommittal

statements for peace. On a Reuters photo, on which Pavle gives his blessing to the Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic (today in custody at The Hague before the War Crimes Tribunal) and Ratko Mladic (who for years has been protected by the Serb authorities and Serb military), these macabre facts have been documented. "We expected”, added Zülch, "that at least Archbishop Zollitsch, who survived one of Tito’s concentration camps, in which thousands of Swabian women and children from the Danube died, would have had more respect for the victims of Sarajevo or Srebrenica.”

The Chairperson of the German section of the STP, Tilman Zülch, will be glad to answer questions at politik@gfbv.de