Date: April 16, 1993
Author: Valentina Krčmar, Mothers for Peace – Bedem Ljubavi (Toronto Chapter)
Addressed to: Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary-General of the United Nations
View the Original Letter: krcmar book 2_Part91-2.pdf
About This Letter
On April 16, 1993, the day after the fall of Srebrenica, Valentina Krčmar wrote one of her most impassioned and devastating letters — an open rebuke to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for the organization’s failure to protect civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The letter is both a moral indictment and a lament, written from the perspective of a mother witnessing the collapse of humanity in real time.
Krčmar opens with fury and grief, describing the atrocities she knows are unfolding:
“Today Srebrenica is in Serbian hands, and from our experience from many Croatian and Bosnian towns and villages we know that the people are being massacred. The horror that is happening in Bosnia has no historical precedent.”
She calls the perpetrators — Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, and General Ratko Mladić — “humans in the form of evil,” and accuses the United Nations and the world’s leaders of feeding their hunger for blood through cowardice and appeasement.
“The U.N. and all the world leaders are just feeding the appetites of these Satans in human form. They will probably sign the Vance-Owen Plan — by the blood of tortured and killed people.”
The letter then becomes a haunting series of moral questions directed at Boutros-Ghali himself:
“How long can you listen to the screams of innocent children?
How long can you listen to the silence of the dead?
How long can you look at the pain and not react?”
Krčmar’s outrage burns through her words as she condemns the hypocrisy of humanitarian aid in the absence of protection:
“Is there any point in feeding those who are going to be slaughtered as lambs?”
She demands that Croatia and Bosnia be armed to defend themselves against “the horde of criminals,” warning that the UN’s inaction will be remembered as complicity in genocide:
“If you do not push for the protection of Croatian and Bosnian people… you and the United Nations will answer one day for aiding and abetting the Serbs in their murderous treks. After the Second World War, everyone tried to say they did not know. Today you know.”
The letter closes with one of Krčmar’s most haunting metaphors — a condemnation of political apathy and moral decay:
“Your politics is like a spring river full of the blood of innocent people. You, gentlemen from the U.N., are watching this red river of horror and pain with a cynical smile of an observer.”
Through her words, Krčmar captures not only the grief of a people abandoned but the shame of a world that allowed genocide to unfold before its eyes. This letter stands as both witness and warning — an indictment of indifference and a cry for the conscience of humanity.
