Balkan Witness

See latest news about this issue here. See the petition archives for more signatures.

We the undersigned are concerned by the handling of the Omarska Memorial Project and wish to state our
support for the following basic principles:

Survivors and families of the dead and missing must lead the design and management of the Memorial Project. For obvious reasons, survivors and families of the missing should not lose their right of participation by virtue of living in exile.
All stakeholders should acknowledge the psychological and historical significance of those buildings formerly used for
purposes of incarceration, torture and extermination. For survivors to witness these buildings used for purposes outside of commemoration, encourages retraumatization.
Mittal Steel should offer a lease over the main camp buildings to a Foundation (along the lines of the Foundation of the
Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery) led by survivors and families of the dead and missing, for the purpose of establishing a
memorial to the Omarska camp. It makes no sense for a commercial company to own and manage its own memorial to the camp.
Where such crimes are concerned, commemoration comes first and is a precondition for reconciliation; the victims have a
fundamental right to tell the truth about what they suffered. This truth is in the best interests of all concerned, and should not be diluted
for commercial or political reasons.
Mittal Steel urgently needs to make a public commitment to support investigations by internationally-recognised bodies such
as ICMP into mass graves on the Mine's land. This commitment should also include sharing information about the existence of any
graves with local organisations representing survivors and families of the missing.

Even if you feel that you are not well enough informed about the whole story, we hope that you can support the right of survivors to decide on
their own memorial and to own it and run it on the site of the Omarska camp. We are advocating principles that should govern a solution, not
any particular solution itself, which should be open to further debate and discussion.

We the undersigned are concerned by the handling of the Omarska Memorial Project and wish to state our support for the following basic principles:

We the undersigned are concerned by the handling of the Omarska Memorial Project and wish to state our
support for the following basic principles: