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Islamic Human Rights Commission
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PRESS RELEASE

9th July 2002

Srebrenica: What Justice for 7000 Victims of Serbian Terror?

As the 7th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia descends, IHRC notes with great sadness the continuing disparity between international principles of justice and the so-called practice of justice in the international arena.

The calculated mass murder of unarmed civilians by Bosnian Serb forces, orchestrated it is clear by Milosevic’s Belgrade, was itself a severe indictment of the United Nations Organisation and its spurious claims to provide safe-havens for those fleeing violence and terror.

It has taken 7 years for the Dutch administration to resign over their national troops’ cowardice and complicity in the surrendering of the UN position to Ratko Mladic’s forces. At the same time the far-right in that country have gained momentum on the basis of an anti-Muslim ticket that echoes the demonisation of Serbian propaganda spouted during the 1980s as a precursor to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Bosnia.

A new administration, feted as liberal due to its democratic credentials is now installed in Belgrade despite the fact that the presidency and the government have refused to apologise for atrocities committed and supported by their predecessors.

There appears to be no concern that the indifference of the US military machine and its allies have already killed 5,000 civilians halfway across the world in its quest for the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities. Yet no operations of magnitude are mandated to find Radovan Karadic and his cohorts indicted for war crimes.

President of the Bosnia Herzegovina Islamic Centre in London, and one of the founder members of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Demir Mahmutcehajic said today:

“The events in Srebrenica were the worst acts of genocide in Europe since the Second World War, and the victims of these atrocities were Muslims. However Muslims are currently being demonised as the perpetrators of world-wide terror regardless of actual facts, and justice for Muslim victims in the truest sense seems to be a distant prospect. The international standards set at Nuremberg have failed to be reapplied to the victims in Bosnia and this simply sends out signals that Muslim life is valued less than the lives of others.”

IHRC’s analysis of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Politics or Justice? Differentiating Between the Nuremberg Trials and ICTY’ by Mahmutcehajic is available online on our website www.ihrc.org, on the reports page. For copies or further information please call the Press Office on (+44) 20 8902 0888, mobile (+44) 958 522 196 or (+44) 7956 803 497, email: info@ihrc.org.

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“And what reason have you that you should not fight in the way of Allah and of the weak among the men and the women and the children, (of) those who say: Our Lord! Cause us to go forth from this town, whose people are oppressors, and give us from Thee a guardian and give us from Thee a helper.”

Holy Qur’an: Chapter 4, Verse 75

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