The following appeal was issued by intellectuals and independent radio “Studio 99” in Sarajevo. Studio 99 is a multi-ethnic station that seeks to promote democracy, peace and progressive causes.

Stand up, friends, raise your voices, call upon all those, both in your countries and here, whose responsibility and will could decide our existence, our “to be or not to be”. Help us now or never in order to prevent ethnic division of the city whose harmonious diversity was confirmed throughout centuries.

What is at stake here -- after the eradication of Bogomisl -- is yet another threat for our civilisation, for our culture, unique in Europe. The epilogue of the final act is the division along ethnic lines, the death sentence for our city.

If this disastrous intention of ethnic division is realised, the city will disappear -- the city of various faiths, ethnic groups, cultures, mentalities, folk traditions, artistic styles -- everything that has been created for centuries to build a mosaic of joint living will thus disappear. The philosophy of tolerance will be replaced here by everlasting hatred. It would become the “Wall of Shame” for the civilisation of Europe. Tens of thousands of trans-ethnically related people would be destroyed here, marriages, families. Their children, grandchildren, the generations to follow would be destroyed emotionally, ethnically, economically, legally.

Raise your voices, friends, together with us, because history will never forget that it has happened in the era of Bill Clinton as the head of the United States, the most powerful force in the history of mankind; in the era when John Major was there to protect the tradition of the once greatest empire; it would happen before the eyes of the man who represents modern freedom-loving France, Francois Mitterrand; we will disappear in the era when Helmuth Kohl succeeded in removing the “Iron Curtain” that was the symbol of German humiliation; in the era of the great Russian reformist, Boris Yeltsin. It was very difficult to erase the shame from the face of the powerful who welcomed and applauded Adolf Hitler while he was setting the greatest fire known in the history of humanity. This fire is again being set!

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