NO BALKAN MOSAIC CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT BOSNIA

Read the full statement here on the Helsinki Committee for Human rights in Serbia site or to the right on this page.

However, the problem of Bosnia remains because there is no political will to address it from a moral point of view. Bosnia has been and remains Europe's moral issue. It is high time the international community defined itself in relation to the crime committed against Bosnia and the Bosniak nation. It is immoral that Srebrenica should be located in the Serb entity and that the murderers and persecutors should be free to walk the streets of that town. When the last of the Women of Srebrenica has died, Srebrenica will not only be a town of the dead but also a dead town.  Therefore, the Declaration of the European Parliament is an important document designed to prevent the Srebrenica genocide from being forgotten. At last, Europe has come to treat the crime as its moral responsibility.

Bosnia can be revitalized only by marginalizing the ethnic principle, which should remain only where it serves to defend the fundamental interests of each nation, as was the case with the chambers of nationalities in the Assembly of the former Yugoslavia.  One should not dismiss some of those arrangements. What one should dismiss, however, is the platitude Belgrade often repeats that Bosnia is a Yugoslavia in miniature and therefore unviable. A "Citizens' Europe" cannot support this argument. It is important to define clearly the points of integrating Bosnia (a common army and police, foreign policy, education and an Assembly whose work cannot be blocked by an entity).