Madam, - This week marks the 12th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by units of the Bosnian Serb army under the command of that arch war criminal, General Ratko Mladic who, shamefully, is still at large.
The atrocity is a stain not just on the record of the United Nations but on that of the European Union. After all, at the start of the crisis that marked the break-up of the former Yugoslavia the Luxembourg foreign minister told George Bush Snr that this was "Europe's affair" and that American involvement was not necessary.
The war, masterminded by Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade was, among other things, a brutal assault on what most Europeans would consider to be European values and it was the Bosnian Serb leadership which introduced the term "ethnic cleansing" into the political lexicon. For many people, including myself, true European values seemed to be embodied by the mainly Muslim population of Sarajevo as they braved indiscriminate shelling by the Bosnian Serb Army in the surrounding hills.
At a time when the leaders of the European Union are drawing up a revised institutional treaty complete with a charter of fundamental rights to replace the text rejected by French and Dutch voters, they need to remember Europe's most recent failure to protect Europeans living in Europe. One way of doing this would be to designate July 11th as Srebrenica Day and hold an annual act of commemoration, as is already done for Holocaust Day. It would be a reminder that the lessons which Holocaust Day is supposed to teach have still not been learned by many people.
As a country emerging from its own troubles and with its own peace process, Ireland is well placed to make such a proposal at the forthcoming intergovernmental conference in Lisbon. - Yours, etc,
ED KELLY, Szeged, Hungary.