We held back on the campaigning, and this site, for an entire year whilst we talked to our friends in Mittal and gave them time to start the project, but the merger of Mittal with Arcelor meant that responsibility for implementing the project passed to the newly formed Mittal-Areclor Foundaton. On May 30, the Dutch OPTIMISTI 2004 foundation formally wrote to the European CEO who was responsible for the purchase of the Omarska site notifying him that we expected the implementation process to proceed more quickly.

We are due to meet with Mittal people soon to agree the implementation, but we feel that enough time has passed now, so we shall revive this site and provide more regular updates just in case we experience further delay.

Also, we have seen some disturbing signs of a failure on the part of the mine company to honour its commitment to leave the White House untouched. Visitors last month reported that some of the artefacts in the building (a desk and chair that were used during the torture at the camp) have been removed and/or broken. This suggests we may need to take a more active approach to ensuring the memorial starts to take shape, but we still have faith in Mittal to follow through on the public commitment it made in 2005, so watch this space...

In the meantime, please help generate as many signatures as possible the petition.