05/27/2011
Society for Threatened Peoples has thousands of eye-witness accounts available
No reason to delay the trial of the "Butcher of Srebrenica"
The trial of "Butcher of Srebrenica" Ratko Mladic at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague can begin immediately. The Göttingen human rights organisation Society for Threatened Peoples has already provided the Court with thousands of witness statements collected in Göttingen and Bosnia during and after the Bosnian War which contain decisive evidence in support of the case against Mladic, STP International's President Tilman Zülch announced on Friday.
19 years ago a score of Bosnian refugees and GfbV staff began documenting reports about Serb concentration camps by refugees, torture victims, rape victims, eye-witne sses to murder and survivors of massacres. Some of these reports have already been used at The Hague in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
The evidence collected against Mladic, Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic was revealed at the 1995 STP-organised Congress on Genocide attended by one hundred participants from the Serb-besieged city of Sarajevo and experts on Bosnia from all around the world. It was "horrifying". 20,000 Bosnian women were victims of a systematically organised campaign of rape. At the conference (under the patronage of Simon Wiesenthal), European governments were condemned for their opposition to military intervention aimed at ending the genocide of the Bosnians. The Congress also heard reports from survivors of the massacre at Srebrenica. STP later helped victims set up the "Women of Srebrenica" organisation which has played an important role in the exhumation and identification of thousands of murdered men and boys.
Zülch called for Serbia's prospective accession to the EU to be postponed until the injustice perpetrated against Bosnia had been atoned for and, most importantly, until all refugees and expulsees from the half of Bosnia under Serb control had returned home.