Tilman Zülch

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Tilman Zülch (2010)

Tilman Zülch (born September 2, 1939 in Deutsch-Liebau , Sudetenland ) is co-founder (together with Klaus Guerke) and president of the Society for Threatened Peoples International (STP).

Life

Zülch was born on September 2, 1939 in Deutsch-Liebau ( Libina ) in the Sudetenland (North Moravia). As a youth in Hamburg, he was involved in the Bündische Jugend (autonomous youth group) from 1955 to 1959 , and he graduated from high school in Louisenlund in the Eckernförde district in 1960 . From 1961 to 1967 Zülch studied economics and politics in Graz, Heidelberg and Hamburg. 1963 he was second chairman of the Hamburg SHB ( Social Democratic University Association ).

In 1968 Tilman Zülch founded together with Klaus Guerke the "Aktion: Biafra Hilfe" against the genocide of the Ibos in Biafra / Eastern Nigeria. Thanks to the international airlift of the churches, Zülch witnessed this genocide in the region that was enclosed and starved on all sides. A year later, the "Society for Threatened Peoples" emerged from "Aktion Biafra-Hilfe" in 1970.

In 1980 Zülch was a co-founder of the Greens in Göttingen, but resigned there in 1981 and has since been independent. From 1985 to 1989 he was banned from entering the GDR. He regards his Stasi files as “recognition” of his work in society for threatened peoples. Zülch has been a member of the jury of the Weimar Human Rights Prize since 1995 and one of the sponsors of the Center against Expulsion .

He was married to the narrative researcher Ines Köhler-Zülch (born June 10, 1941 in Magdeburg ; † April 24, 2019 in Göttingen).

Human rights

The main concern of the Society for Threatened Peoples is to work for ethnically or religiously persecuted communities on all continents and under all political systems. The human rights organization fights genocide , ethnocide , displacement and racism . She advocates the recognition and integration of political refugees and advocates the return of displaced persons in “dignity”. Binding guidelines of the politically and economically independent international human rights organization are the slogans “Not blind to any eye” and “Nobody speaks”. It is supported by over 15,000 members and several 10,000 donors and supporters. The Society for Threatened Peoples International has "advisory status" at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (since 1993) and "participating status" at the Council of Europe (since 1995). It has national sections and offices in Switzerland (Bern), Austria (Vienna), Italy (Bozen / South Tyrol), Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo and Srebrenica), Germany (Göttingen and Berlin) and in Arbil ( Autonomous Region Kurdistan / Iraq ) , also representatives in London and Luxembourg.

Zülch understands human rights engagement as a combative effort for persecuted minorities. To stand up for religiously and ethnically persecuted people is not least an obligation, which arises above all for Germany and Austria, not least from the Nazi crimes and the Holocaust : "Auschwitz", declared Heinrich Böll in March 1970 after a conversation with Zülch about Biafra, "Must not be a brake, but must become an occasion for brotherhood." According to Zülch, coming to terms with the German past must not lead to other historical crimes such as those of Stalinism and the mass expulsions after 1945 being taboo and today's genocide to be belittled or suppressed. The genocide crimes in Tibet , East Bengal, East Timor , West Papua New Guinea, the Amazon Indians, the Kurds and Assyrian Christians of North Iraq, South Sudan , East Slavonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were the focus of the STP's work under the direction of Zülch from the early 1970s onwards. In order to draw attention to the situation of the indigenous nations, the human rights organization organized the first major tour of Germany in 1977/78 by indigenous delegates from 16 American states from Canada to Argentina with 65 events, to which 30,000 participants came.

With the publication of the first volume since the end of the war, devoted to the genocide of Sinti and Roma , which had been taboo for 35 years, in Rowohlt Verlag and a subsequent three-year campaign, Zülch set in motion comprehensive reporting in the German-language media about this National Socialist genocide, moving the Federal President and the Federal Chancellor for the public recognition of the Nazi crimes against the German and European "Gypsies", initiated the first pension solution as reparation for the years of persecution of members of the ethnic minority, implemented and initiated the terms "Sinti" and "Roma" State funding for self-administered Sinti and Roma offices that exist today in most federal states. The civil rights movement of the German Sinti and Roma that emerged in the course of this campaign since October 1979 continues this work to this day.

Zülch's longstanding commitment to society for threatened peoples also applied to oppressed minorities and dissidents in the communist states of Eastern Europe, against genocide and displacement in Afghanistan and against Soviet arms deliveries to military dictatorships in the Third World. From 1985 to 1989 Zülch was banned from entering the GDR. In his Stasi files, Zülch and the Society for Threatened Peoples are accused of subversive activity against the GDR and cooperation with the British secret service. The observation by the Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution (1973–1978) on the grounds that black African communists had infiltrated the human rights organization was no less absurd. However, as genocide refugees, the South Sudanese and Biafran STP members were also victims of both Soviet and Western arms deliveries to the governments of Nigeria and Sudan.

Zülch has been the publisher of the magazine “pogrom” since 1970, a specialist journal on the situation of ethnic and religious minorities and indigenous peoples (natives). The magazine appears in 2014 in the 45th year.

As early as December 1989, Zülch initiated the establishment of the GfbV-GDR in East Berlin, in which representatives of the Sorbs and many long-time friends of the human rights organization, who have been officially allowed to get involved, also took part. In January and March 1990 he launched a short documentary about the extermination of around 70,000 Germans in the concentration camps of the Soviet occupation zone (1945–1950), which found wide coverage in the media of the former GDR and was also the basis of a Spiegel report.

In 1987/88 and 1990/91, Zülch, together with Alexander von Sternberg, campaigned against German arms deliveries to Iraq , primarily through the companies Pilot Plant and Karl Kolb , who were involved in the development of an Iraqi poison gas industry. In August 1987 the GfbV was punished by the Bonn regional court with a fine of two times DM 500,000 for the case of “repeated defamation” of the two companies. The claim that the two companies made possible the destruction of Kurdish and Assyrian-Aramaic village communities was forbidden. This court judgment was later overturned by the Cologne Higher Regional Court. The responsible company managers were briefly taken into custody three years later. In September 1990, Zülch, together with A. Sternberg-Spohr, exposed the breach of the arms embargo for Iraq by the MBB company.

Since April 1991, Zülch has been particularly committed to the victims of war and partial genocide in Croatia , Bosnia , Kosovo and currently for the Kosovar Roma and Ashkali persecuted by Albanian extremists. He published the first book on the genocide of Bosnian Muslims published in Western countries, the manuscript of which the then German Post and Telecommunications Minister Christian Schwarz-Schilling referred to when he announced his resignation in protest against the German government's policy on Bosnia. In 1999 Zülch published documentations for the GfbV on the genocide of the Kosovar Albanians and on the expulsion of the Roma and Ashkali in Kosovo. In particular, media work for Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 received an international response far beyond Germany in Western Europe and North America.

Awards

Fonts

  • Biafra, death sentence for a people? ; together with Klaus Guerke, Lettner Verlag Berlin 1968, with a foreword by Golo Mann
  • Should Biafra survive? ; together with Klaus Guerke, Lettner Verlag Berlin, 1969 with a foreword by Golo Mann
  • Nobody speaks of. Persecuted Minorities , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979
  • Gassed in Auschwitz, persecuted to this day - on the situation of the Roma (Gypsies) in Europe , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979, with a foreword by Ernst Tugendhat
  • The "gypsies", misunderstood, despised, persecuted ; together with Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Lower Saxony State Center for Political Education, Hanover 1980
  • Uprising of the victims - betrayed peoples between Hitler and Stalin , together with Johannes Vollmer, pogrom Taschenbücher, Göttingen 1986
  • Genocide against the Kurds , Luchterhand, Hamburg / Zurich 1991
  • Genocide in Iraq - persecution and extermination of Kurds and Assyrian Christians 1968 to 1990 , together with Inse Geismar, human rights report of the GfbV, Göttingen 1991
  • "Ethnic cleansing - genocide for Greater Serbia" , Luchterhand, Hamburg / Zurich 1993 / "Etnicko ciscenje" - Genocid za "Veliku Srbiju", Sarajevo 1996
  • The poet's fear of reality, 16 answers to Peter Handke's “Winter Journey to Serbia” , Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 1996 / Pjesnikov Strah od stvarnosti - 16 odgovora na P. Handkeovo “Zimsko Putovanje u Srbiju”, Sarajevo 1997, Vijece Kongresa bosnjackih intelektualaca i institut za istrazivanje zlocina protiv covjecnosti i medunarodnog prava
  • Until the last “gypsy” left the country - mass expulsion of the Roma and Ashkali from Kosovo ; with an appeal from Günter Grass; Human rights report by the GfbV, Göttingen 1999

Web links / sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary , accessed on November 14, 2019
  2. ↑ Awarding of the European Social Prize in Eschweiler 2010 ( Memento from September 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Integration award . Apple Tree Foundation, accessed on October 30, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Zülch, Tilman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH German Liebau , Sudetenland