Open Letter to Miss Madeleine Rees

Miss Madeleine Rees
Head of Office
Human Rights Field Operation in BiH

Dear Miss Rees,

I received your letter in which you informed me of the wish of the Special Representative of the Commission of Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina and FRY, Mr. Jose Cutileiro, to meet me during his stay in BiH.

I would like to use this occasion to convince you that it was a pleasure to co-operate with Mr. Tadeush Mazowiecki and Mrs. Elisabeth Rehn in the last years, who had invested great efforts in improving the state of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and me personally, remember Mr. Jose Cutileiro as the person who took part in finding political solutions to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the very beginning of the war. At that time, the proposals and the solutions given by Mr. Cutileiro, first with Lord Carrington and later on with Lord Owen, stood for ethnic division of Bosnia and Herzegovina and reflected aspirations of the former nationalistic leaders among whom we should mention Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman… Those solutions, in essence, were contrary to the concept of human rights and were based on the policy of exchange of territories, ethnic cleansing, not on the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations and other relevant international documents.

Thus therefore, I am surprised that Mr. Cutileiro has accepted the role of defender of human rights in this region. At the same time, I am also surprised that the Chairperson of the 57th Session of the Commission for Human Rights of UN appointed Mr. Cutileiro for this significant post.

My relation towards human rights and recent past of this country makes me to reject to meet Mr. Cutileiro.

Hoping that you would understand my reasons, I remain respectfully yours,

Srdjan Dizdarevic
President of BH HC