With sadness, Women in Black remember that 15 years ago, on April 6th, the four-year-long blockade of Sarajevo began. During the blockade, nearly 11,000 people died, 1,601 children among them. Women in Black demands punishment for the murderers at all levels of responsibility for the crimes committed against that city.
We remember that the siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days, making it the longest in the history of modern warfare. The first victims in multiethnic Sarajevo were women - Suada Dilberovic and Olga Sucic. The commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, Ratko Mladic - indiscriminately into the internationally-known capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The result of the criminal politics of the Milosevic regime, by means of their collaborators in the Bosnian War, was 96,000 victims.
Women in Black remember that Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the supreme commanders who ordered the crimes committed against Bosnia, were proxies of the Milosevic regime. Today, the government still protects them.
For crimes against besieged cities and their inhabitants, The Hague Tribunal sentenced one wartime military leader to life imprisonment. Another is still on trial. Despite these sentences for the committers of crimes, despite The International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, these killers of the innocent are still celebrated as heroes in Serbia.
We urge the government to extradite the Hague indictees without hesitation. We urge the citizens of Serbia to confront the crimes committed in their name.
Belgrade, April 5, 2007
Women in Black
