A Letter by Grand Mufti Emeritus Mustafa Ceric, President of the World Bosniak Congress to Judge Theodor Meron, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in Den Haag
Dear Judge Meron,
As we are preparing here in Bosnia for tomorrow’s burial of more than 400 victims of Srebrenica Genocide I remember the statement you made at Potocari Memorial Cemetery on 23 June 2004 when you said:
“Those who drafted, on the heels of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide, were animated by the desire to ensure that the horror of a state-organized deliberate and massive murder of a group of people purely because of their identity will never recur in the history of humankind. The authors of the Convention hoped that by encapsulating the crime of genocide, by declaring unambiguously that it will not go unpunished, and by requiring the international community to do the utmost to prevent it, they will forestall forever attempts to annihilate any national, ethnic or religious group in the world. As the graves in this cemetery testify, the struggle to make the world free of genocide is not easy and is not one of uninterrupted victories. But I would like to think that by recognizing the crimes committed here as genocide, and by condemning them with the utmost force at our command, we have helped to make the hope of those who drafted the Genocide Convention into an expectation and perhaps even a reality. As I stand here today, I can do little better than to repeat the solemn warning sounded by the Appeals Chamber of our Tribunal that those who commit this inhumane crime will not escape justice before the courts of law and the court of history”.
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