Bosnia & Herzegovina: Ten years after - Public Announcement

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On the occasion of 6th April, tenth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina

It's ten years since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began and escalated into one of the most infamous episodes in the entire history of the Balkans, into blood bath, waged by armed military formations and paramilitary cliques against the civilian population and marked by genocide, mass rapes and other forms of violations of basic human rights, starting from the right to live and further down the list.

Prominent figures in that war were some self-proclaimed Serbian patriots, in addition to their headman, Slobodan Milosevic. They organized, ordered and committed the most atrocious crimes against the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, unfortunately, were supported by a considerable portion of inhabitants of our country. Although it was not only the Serbs who committed crimes in the Bosnian war, the democratically orientated and civilian part of Serbia has the obligation to confront our public with the unpleasant truth that crimes were also committed by Serbs. Before we accept the truth and come to terms with the fact that crimes have been committed in our name, we cannot look ahead into the future and regain our human dignity.

The fact is that only The Hague Tribunal is concerned with processing the war criminals, while our democratic authorities are opportunistically conspiring with the advocates of crime, or pragmatically calculating their cooperation with the Hague, failing to do anything to enable the Serbian judiciary system to apply the law, which says that crime - and above all crime against humanity - must not be left unpunished.

In this respect we demand that the authorities of the Republic of Serbia and of the FR Yugoslavia immediately hand over to the Hague Tribunal all the suspects for war crimes, and primarily the fake hero Ratko Mladic, the executioner of Srebrenica. By extraditing this criminal, Serbia shed one part of the stigma that the self-proclaimed defenders of "the threatened Serbs" have inflicted upon us, and we, citizens of Serbia, will have a chance to be relieved, at last, of the spectacle of crime and to stop being hostages of the same protagonists.

Belgrade, 6 April 2002

Signatories:

  1. Women in Black - Belgrade
  2. ZENA - Nis
  3. Zene dolaze - Cacak
  4. Forum zena LSV
  5. Zenski centar - Leskovac
  6. Forum zena SDU
  7. Zensko aktivno drustvo - Novi Sad
  8. Eva - Novi Sad
  9. Nera - Bela Crkva
  10. Azrael - Kraljevo
  11. SOS Hera - Kragujevac
  12. Zenske inicijative - Valjevo
  13. Sekcija zena UGS Nezavisnost - Beograd
  14. Feministicka 94 - Beograd
  15. Odbor za prava coveka - Vranje
  16. Socijalademokratska omladina - Kragujevac
  17. Damad - Nopvi Pazar
  18. Cilim - Pirot
  19. Impuls - Tutin
  20. Spona - Kula/Vrbas
  21. Zenska mirovna grupa - Pancevo
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