Ian Black, European editor Thursday April 11, 2002 The Guardian
The Netherlands government, its army and the UN were all to blame for the massacre of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica by Serb forces in 1995, a report published yesterday says.
Prepared by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), it strongly criticises the Dutch government for putting prestige before planning and sending poorly prepared troops on an ill-defined "mission impossible" to the UN "safe area".
The UN is accused of failing to give the blue berets of the Dutch battalion the support they needed to defend the local population, and the wider international community is accused of of "muddling through" the Balkan crisis.
The long-awaited document of more than 7,000 pages, commissioned by Wim Kok's government in 1996, brought immediate calls for a parliamentary inquiry before which ministers would have to testify under oath.
"The politicians must accept the consequences," Jan Peter Balkenende, head of the opposition Christian Democrats, said, raising the political temperature before next month's general election.
Mr Kok said: "I will face responsibility for what my predecessors and I have done." But the report was criticised as a "whitewash" in both the Netherlands and Bosnia.
It gives what is likely to be the definitive account of the most traumatic event in recent Dutch history, which has left a residue of anguished guilt about collaboration with ethnic cleansing.
Radislav Krstic, a Bosnian Serb general, was jailed for 46 years by the Hague tribunal last summer for genocide at Srebrenica. But General Ratko Mladic, the overall Serb commander, remains at large.
The report says: "Humanitarian motivation and political ambitions drove the Netherlands to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission."
Two hundred lightly armed peacekeepers were sent "to keep the peace where there was no peace" without obtaining information from the Canadians who had preceded them. The town fell without a shot being fired in July 1995.
The Dutch soldiers, falsely believing that the UN would use air power, were "caught between two fires". They became exhausted and more concerned about their own survival than the fate of the Bosnian Muslims.
The government is accused of not devoting enough resources to intelligence and the army of turning down a CIA offer of equipment to tap Serb army communications.
There was no evidence that the mass executions of the Muslims was seen by the Dutch. The role of General Mladic, however, was "beyond doubt".
The report refers to accusation that the Dutch soldiers were indifferent to the fate of the Muslims, after a film showed troops drinking beer in Zagreb. But it says: "The nature and scale of the mass killings were not yet known, let alone fully realised; the partying was the spontaneous release of emotions after a very moving memorial service for dead colleagues."
The report confirmed the findings of a French investigation which accused a French general, Bernard Janvier, of an error of judgment in refusing to sanction air strikes against the Serbs, as the Dutch requested.
Relatives of the massacre victims said the report failed to draw conclusions concerning individuals.