Göttingen (epd). The founder and chairman of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), Tilman Zülch, is dead. As the human rights organization based in Göttingen announced on Saturday, he died on Friday at the age of 83. “Tilman Zülch was a visionary of human rights work,” says an obituary by the GfBV. His view of the fate of ethnic and religious minorities and indigenous peoples, his selfless commitment to combating genocide and displacement are exemplary for international human rights work today.
Zülch was born in 1939 in Deutsch-Liebau (Libina) in the Sudetenland. As a teenager he was involved in the Bundische Jugend, and as a politics and economics student in Hamburg in the Social Democratic University Association. At that time, a bloody civil war was raging in eastern Nigeria, which had declared itself independent as the Republic of Biafra. Hundreds of thousands of people died from bombs, starvation and disease. Because Great Britain was supplying the Nigerian military with weapons, members of the “Aid for Biafra” committee occupied the British Consulate General in Hamburg at the end of June 1968. One of the activists was Tilman Zülch.
He expands the Biafra Committee into the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) by 1970: an organization with the aim of protecting and enforcing the human rights of ethnic and religious minority groups worldwide. Supported by a handful of volunteers, Zülch remained the only full-time activist for ten years.
With Zülch at the top and sometimes spectacular actions, the human rights activists made it into the headlines again and again. In 1988 they revealed that German companies were partly responsible for the use of poison gas against Kurds in Iraq. In 1992, in the so-called Columbus Year, two activists crossed the Atlantic on a bamboo raft to deliver a message of reconciliation to the South American Indians. Under the motto “Not blind in any eye”, the human rights organization campaigns for victims of genocide in Sudan and Muslim Uyghurs in China, for oppressed Christians in Pakistan and for Kurds in Turkey.
But there was also criticism. When the GfbV invited indigenous people from Nicaragua to Europe, who together with right-wing “Contras” were fighting the Sandinista liberation front FSLN, Third World groups protested. During the Yugoslav war, peace initiatives criticized society’s one-sided and polarizing commitment to threatened peoples – early on they branded the Serbs as the sole culprits and called for NATO military strikes in favor of the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians.
And Zülch himself was not without controversy. Internally, employees and honorary board members occasionally complained about the authoritarian rule of the general secretary. In 2012, a dispute over allegedly unproven allocations and unjustly received salaries culminated in criminal charges and the expulsion of two board members. In the spring of 2017, Zülch handed over the management of the GfbV to the organization’s Africa and Asia expert, Ulrich Delius.
Zülch received 16 prizes and awards for his commitment, including the Göttingen Peace Prize, the European Civil Rights Prize for Sinti and Roma and the Federal Cross of Merit.