After nearly 50 years, Tilman Zülch, one of the most prominent human rights activists in Germany, will retire from his position as Secretary General of the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP). In the future, the 77-year-old founder of the STP will continue to provide advice for the STP’s campaigns. Ulrich Delius, the long-term Asia and Africa expert of the STP, will take over the political management of the human rights organization.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Society for Threatened Peoples, Tilman Zülch is planning to compile a documentary about the organization’s consistent struggle against genocide crimes and mass expulsion that affect ethnic as well as religious minorities and indigenous communities, since 1968. In that year, Zülch and Klaus Guercke – who were students in Hamburg back then – had founded the “Aktion Biafrahilfe”, thus laying the basis for the Society for Threatened Peoples. The initiative aimed to provide political support and humanitarian aid for the ten million members of the Ibo people, who had been subjected to a hunger blockade by the Nigerian government, with military support from the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Thanks to the Joint Church Airlift, Zülch was able to witness the siege of Biafra, the starvation of about two million victims, himself. In October 1968, Günter Grass held a speech during the first major Biafra-demonstration in Hamburg, and personalities such as Ernst Bloch, Heinrich Böll, Paul Celan, Helmut Gollwitzer, Erich Kästner, Siegfried Lenz, or Carl Zuckmayer supported the initiative of the Biafra-Hilfe.

Led by Tilman Zülch, the STP continued to swim against the tide and to speak on behalf of population groups that no one else speaks about (accordingly, one of Zülch’s books is titled “Über die keiner spricht”). As of 1970, the STP supported the Kurds, the Yezids, and the Assyrian/Aramaic/Chaldean Christians in the Middle East – and the STP was able to prove that German companies had been involved in building up the toxic gas industry and a combat helicopter fleet in Iraq, making them partly responsible for the gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja, with about 5,000 victims. In 1977/78, there was the first major Europe Tour of representatives of 16 indigenous communities in North and South America – with overwhelming public response.

From 1979 to 1981, the STP succeeded in raising public awareness of the holocaust crimes against the Sinti and Roma, which had been tabooed before. Finally, a breakthrough was achieved – not least thanks to the book “In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt” (published by Zülch in 1979, with a foreword by the philosopher Ernst Tugendhat), a mourning march to the concentration camp memorial Bergen-Belsen (1979) – organized in cooperation with the Association of the German Sinti, under Romani Rose – with Simone Veil, then president of the European Parliament, and Heinz Galinski, then president of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany, and thanks to the International Roma Congress (1981) in Göttingen under the patronage of Simon Wiesenthal and Indira Ghandi (with 400 Roma delegates from 26 states and five continents): the German government acknowledged the genocide crimes , the stateless Sinti were granted German citizenship, the term “Gypsy” was replaced by “Sinti / Roma”, and their newly established associations received support by the state.

During the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the STP was probably the loudest and most emphatic critical voice in Germany, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans, the Bosnian Muslims, had to run for their lives, were trapped in front of closed borders, were locked up in concentration and rape camps, or died in the bombardment of their cities. The massacre of Srebrenica was the tragic climax of their ordeal. In 1993, the STP organized the Bosnia-demonstration in front of the Concentration Camp Memorial in Buchenwald – with 3,000 participants, including Marek Edelman, Commander of the Resistance Fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, and the Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis. This was followed by the large Bosnia-demonstration in Bonn in 1994 (with 50,000 participants), the founding of the Bosnian Forum (1994), the construction of a symbolic cemetery in front of the private home of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1995), and the Bosnian Genocide Congress in Frankfurt (1995). In this context, we would once again like to thank personalities such as Rita Süssmuth, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, and Martin Walser.

In 1992, the United Nations in New York granted Zülch and the STP advisory status, and the Council of Europe granted the STP participatory status in 2005.

In 1999, Simon Wiesenthal wrote to Tilman Zülch: “You have founded and built up an organization to which people can turn to if they are threatened, whether the threat is targeted against individuals or against certain groups. You have advocated for the rights of so many people, focusing your efforts on the persons themselves – without regard for possible disadvantages or criticism. You have achieved a lot, and you serve as an example. I was always glad to be able to count on your cooperation. I hope there will be many more successful years and initiatives to come for you and your colleagues!”

For his tireless commitment as a controversial admonisher, Zülch – who is the editor of a series of books on genocide and expulsion, as well as the journal “Bedrohte Völker – pogrom” – has received 16 awards, including the Federal Cross of Merit, the Lower Saxony Prize for Journalism, the Göttinger Friedenspreis, the Honorary Citizenship of the City of Sarajevo, the Citizenship Prize of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, and the Srebrenica Award against Genocide. According to Zülch, these awards are also to be seen as a recognition of the work of the employees and the regional groups, as well as of the commitment of the members and supporters of the STP.

“We are very indebted to Tilman Zülch,” says Feryad Fazil Omar, the STP’s Federal Chairman. “He taught us not to let up in the tough struggle for the human rights of minorities – even after so many years – to accept setbacks, and to develop creative ideas to draw attention to the situation of minorities again and again.”

“Zülch’s aims are our guideline. His sense of injustice, his energy and his determination – uninfluenced by ideologies or party politics – to stand up for minorities, and his great willingness to advocate for the rights of the weaker ones will serve as an example for our future human rights work,” emphasized Ulrich Delius (58), who has now been working for the STP for more than 30 years, initiating numerous national and international campaigns on behalf of ethnic groups in Africa and Asia who are threatened with genocide, expulsion, or severe human rights violations – for example the distressed Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia, or Nigeria, the oppressed Tibetans and persecuted Uyghurs in China, the Muslim Rohingya in Burma or the Oromo in Ethiopia who are threatened with land grabbing, the Darfuris who are threatened with genocide and displacement in the West Of Sudan, and the slaves in Mauritania.