A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Dutch Anguish

The role of the Dutch UN peacekeepers in the fall of Srebrenica has made headline news throughout 2002. Early in the year, two independent reports were released by Dutch NGOs criticizing the peacekeepers, their government, and their UN superiors.

The Interchurch Peace Council report stated that when Srebrenica fell, Mladic asked the Dutch commander, Colonel Ton Karremans, if he could organize the evacuation of 20,000 people from the Srebrenica enclave. Karremans checked with his superiors and was told "no." The report asserts that if the UN had responded positively, the separation and massacre of male Srebrenicans could have been prevented. The report also states that the Dutch Battalion should have remained in Srebrenica until the safety of the males was assured.

The report concludes that “for the Dutch government, the lives of its soldiers were more important than the security of the Bosnians who depended on them.” The Council released a film that showed Mladic giving a present to the Dutch commander as the Dutch were leaving Srebrenica. Karremans was touched. He asked: “For my wife?” Mladic nodded. When the Dutch soldiers arrived in Zagreb, they had a great banquet with drinking and dancing. Meanwhile, the men of Srebrenica were being shot in the fields and in the woods.

Soon afterwards, a second report from the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, running over 7,000 pages, concluded that the Dutch government sent ill-prepared troops to Srebrenica with an impossible mission. The report characterized the government’s initiative as naïve, rash, inefficient, and badly coordinated. The harsh conclusion was based on a review of tens of thousands of documents, as well as interviews with over 900 witnesses. The report also asserted that the United Nations did not pay sufficient attention to the risk of a massacre, at the time that Serbian forces took over Srebrenica. (Press release about this report)

After the publication of these two important reports in Holland Prime Minister Wim Kok, Minister of Defense Frank de Grave, and the rest of the Dutch cabinet resigned. It was a surprising -- even astonishing -- move. Many of those who resigned had not even been in power during the siege and fall of Srebrenica. Yet they declared that the “moral thing to do” was to take responsibility for the previous government’s actions. Soon afterwards, the Dutch Army chief of staff also resigned. In response to these events, the Dutch Parliament announced that it would initiate an investigation of its own.

The response in Bosnia to these dramatic events was mixed. When the Institute’s report came out, the groups of Srebrenica widows demonstrated angrily in front of the Dutch Embassy in Sarajevo. Widows blocked the limousines of diplomats and shouted furiously. Srebrenicans were particularly angry because the report described the Srebrenica massacre victims as members of the Muslim army. This was true in some cases, but a vast distortion because so many of those killed were very young or old. Women were also killed.

Meanwhile, the widows and other Srebrenica activists declared the resignation of the Dutch government to be a "moral act," but demanded a more complete admission of responsibility from the Dutch government. They also asked that the officials in the chain of command -- from Colonel Karremans up to the high military and political officials mentioned in the report -- be named and prosecuted.

After the Dutch government resigned, the University of Sarajevo’s Institute for Research of War Crimes also released a report. This concluded that Karremans had prevented the Federation Army in Srebrenica from defending the enclave, and had deceived inhabitants of the enclave into thinking that international forces were going to defend them.

There is still much controversy over this issue. In 1993, the UN negotiated a cease-fire agreement which stipulated that Muslim troops in the enclave would disarm. In return, the Serbs would restrain from attacks and the UN would enforce the ceasefire. Both Muslims and Serbs violated this agreement periodically, but it was the Serb forces who squeezed Srebrenica mercilessly throughout the war before closing in on it for their final deadly assault.

As the fighting again intensified, Muslim fighters in Srebrenica reportedly asked Karremans for the weapons they had turned in under demilitarization, so that they could defend themselves. Karremans asked the Muslims to withdraw from their positions, because NATO was going to attack advancing Serb forces with airplanes. The NATO attack never materialised. Instead, Serb forces launched an artillery attack on Bosnians and the Dutch Battalion alike. The Dutch did not fire a single bullet in defense, and the town fell.

Meanwhile the war of words continues. The Sarajevo report even describes the Dutch Institute’s report as “scandalous,” because it refers to “ethnic cleansing” instead of using the word “genocide,” and appears to gloss over the aggression and violence of the Serbs by using the more neutral term “conflicting parties.”