MORE UN INCOMPETENCE OR A GOOD REASON TO KEEP THE UN OUT OF IRAQ
Massacre report blames UN, Dutch January 29 2003 By Isabelle Wesselingh The Hague
A long-awaited Dutch parliamentary probe into the 1995 massacre in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica blamed the United Nations and the Dutch government yesterday for errors in judgment that failed to prevent Europe's worst single atrocity since World War II.
The report also singled out the French commander of UN forces in ex-Yugoslavia, General Bernard Janvier, for failing to rush air support to the zone.
In July 1995, more than 7000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered after Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran Srebrenica, a UN-declared "safe area" manned by Dutch peacekeepers during the Bosnian war.
"The committee thinks that there were underestimations both in the Netherlands and at the UN as to what Bosnian Serbs were in a position to do," said the findings released yesterday.
"The entire international community was trailing behind events and was insufficiently prepared for the war crimes that were committed by the Bosnian Serbs," it said.
The fall of Srebrenica marked a turning point in the war, prompting a change in strategy introducing massive air strikes to spare remaining UN safe areas a similar fate.
Grisly testimony of the mutilation and slaughter that followed the Serb onslaught moved one judge at the UN war crimes court here to describe the episode as "scenes from Hell, written on the darkest pages of human history".
And eight years later, Holland remains haunted over the failure of the town's Dutch protectors to act.
"The (UN) Security Council, as well as the (Dutch) cabinet and House of Representatives, did not take sufficient account of the precise meaning of the concept 'protection of the population'," the report said.
Yesterday's findings follow a damning government report in April that accused Dutch political and military leaders of giving their peacekeepers an "impossible" mission to protect the UN enclave.
The April publication led Wim Kok's government to resign, along with the head of the Dutch army, General Ad van Baal. Political fall-out from yesterday's report was expected to be minor, however, since all the key officials have left the political scene.
The report deplored what it saw as the UN's failure to adapt a mandate that had become untenable.
Outnumbered and lightly armed without a clear mandate to use force, the 200 Dutch peacekeepers felt they could not defend Srebrenica and withdrew to nearby Potocari.
The report sought to lighten the burden of blame on the Dutch soldiers, saying they "bore no responsibility for the separation of the men and women" by Bosnian Serbs after they overran the town. It also stressed that Dutch peacekeepers had "had to perform an extraordinarily difficult task under very difficult circumstances".
The findings are expected to add force to international pressure on the former Yugoslavia for the arrests of top war crimes fugitives General Mladic and his political chief, Radovan Karadzic, to stand trial at the UN tribunal.
In a final note, the report urged the Netherlands to play a role in Srebrenica's future.
