Dec 5th 2006
From Economist.com
Dutch peacekeepers may not deserve blame for the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. But nor do they deserve medals
IT SEEMS a provocative, even callous, thing to do. This week the Dutch government awarded medals to soldiers who had failed, in 1995, to prevent a massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, in the midst of the war in Bosnia. On Monday December 4th the Dutch defence minister, Henk Kamp, told a parade of 500 soldiers that they had faced an “extraordinarily difficult task” in being asked to protect Muslims in the UN enclave at Srebrenica. Confronted by Serb attackers, and without air support or diplomatic help from UN allies, the lightly armed Dutch were unable to stop the killings. Mr Kamp suggested that the Dutch battalion “has for years wrongly been held responsible for what happened in the enclave”.
The massacre at Srebrenica was the worst in Europe since the second world war. Responsibility for the killings should indeed be laid first with the Bosnian Serbs who carried them out, and to some extent with other participants in a brutal regional conflict. To this end the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague has charged 20 people over the massacre. In 2002 the Dutch government resigned after a report blamed politicians for sending troops on an impossible mission. The peacekeeping soldiers on the ground faced an invidious situation, whose creation was in part the responsibility of other European powers and of America.