DUTCHBAT IGNORANCE CAUGHT ON TAPE
By Winter 1992/93, the number of Bosniak refugees had surged to 80,000 and Bosniak refugees started dying of starvation. Furthermore, Serbs around Srebrenica had constantly attacked neighbouring Bosniak villages, frequently bombarding them from air and with Serbian airplanes.
In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army - with logistical and military support from Serbia - staged a brutal takeover of Srebrenica and its surrounding area, where they proceeded to perpetrate genocide. Bosnian Serb soldiers and paramilitary groups separated Bosniak families, forcibly expelled 30,000 Bosniaks, and summarily executed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. The Dutchbat peacekeepers helplessly stood by and watched as genocidal Serb forces "targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica." (Krstic appeal judgement). The Netherlands even awarded them medal for their cowardice in Srebrenica. At the time of the massacre, Dutch U.N. Commander Thom Karremans (aka: Thomas Karremans) drank a toast with Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic (see photo taken on July 12, 1995).
More research:
1. Rebuttal to Philippe Morillon's Distortions on Srebrenica -read here...
2. Carlos Martins Branco, a habitual liar and genocide denier -read here...
3. Can Genocide be Committed by Forcibly Expelling the Women and Children? -here is the answer...
4. Dutch justice? Judge in Srebrenica case private advisor of Radovan Karadzic -read here...
5. Two discredited genocide deniers and habitual liars in the Netherlands: Marco Van Hees and Aleksandar Gavrilovic -read here...
6. Dutchbat peacekeepers revisit Srebrenica -read here...
7. Bosnian Jew Sven Alkalaj - our true friend -read here...
8. U.N. / Dutch must accept the responsibility for the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide -read here...
9. Fifteen Dutch activists, former U.N. Blue Helmets (Dutchbat Peacekeepers) to testify in favor of Radovan Karadzic -read here...
10. Foreseeable Genocide: Testimony by Pierre Salignon -read here...
11. Life in Hell, the Enclave of "Safe Haven" -read here...
1. The United Nations on Srebrenica's Pillar of Shame: 104 testimonies about the role of the UN in genocide against the population of the UN “Srebrenica Safe Haven”
- Author: Women of Srebrenica.
2. Under the U.N. Flag: The International Community and the Srebrenica Genocide
- Author: Hasan Nuhanovic.
posted by Srebrenica Genocide at 12:01 AM
19 Comments:
Andras Riedlmayer has just republished an Associated Press report at JUSTWATCH about the death of Hans van Mierlo, Dutch foreign minister at time of Srebrenica.
At the time van Mierlo blamed the international community for failing to give substance to the Security Council designation of the Muslim enclaves as "safe areas".
The JUSTWATCH item also includes two Dutch news items from the period immediately following the genocide at Srebrenica.
The first describes Van Mierlo's sppech to the UN's 50th General Assembly.
"We, the member states, had convinced ourselves, and what is more, our Bosnian proteges, that a largely symbolic UN presence would be sufficient to deter aggression. It did not", Van Mierlo told the 50th UN General Assembly. The world had been proved cruelly wrong in its assessment of the situation and its response resulting in a heavy price in human life and displacement being paid by the enclaves' residents at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs, he continued.
He said that the Netherland deplored the international community's inability to halt the widespread human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and systematic terror inflicted by both sides, but the Bosnian Serbs in particular, during the conflict and called for the Security Council and troop contributors to ensure that international resolutions were in future backed up by firm political will and solid military planning with a commitment to use force when necessary.
He added, "Srebrenica and Zepa have shown that humanitarian action can never be a substitute for decisive measures against a party which perpetrates aggression and massive human rights violations."
http://www.nisnews.nl/dossiers/srebrenica/srebrenica.htm
NIS News Bulletin
28 September 1995
The second article reproduced at JUSTWATCH refers to an October 1995 report in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad about secret UN documents, saying UN observers signed statements saying that three Muslim men were ordered from a refugee camp under Dutch control into the arms of waiting Serbs. "They were ordered to leave the compound with other refugees in the evening of July 13, 1995. They were last seen passing through the gate behind which the Serb soldiers were standing," the paper quoted one statement as saying.
http://www.nisnews.nl/dossiers/srebrenica/srebrenica.htm
NIS News Bulletin
24 October 1995
It's not clear who are the three referred to, but it's possible that the article is referring specifically to Ibro and Muhamed Nuhanovic and Rizo Mustafic, whose deaths after being handed over to Ratko Mladic's troops by Dutchbat is the subject of the Hague District Court cases against The Netherlands government.
Is there any specific reason why Boudewijn Kok has travelled to Srebrenica again? I suspect Hatidza Mehmetovic is particularly angry because she's not the first of the mothers who's been confronted by Kok's excuses for the Dutch government, who it should be remembered chose for their own political reasons to take on the task of "protecting" the safe area.
For some reason I don't seem to be able to access some of your old posts at SGB and the only way of getting to them is via a search of the blog. If you do a search on "Boudewijn", the post beneath today's one is a post from 2007, about Kok's visit to Srebrenica with another group of ex-Dutchbat soldiers when he managed to upset Hajra Catic and Munira Subasic.
Some Dutchbat soldiers are clearly extremely distressed and desperately wanting to try to make amends, but other visits have been reported that had a distinct whiff of public relations about the comments reported. It's not clear which category this visit falls into, which is why it would be interesting to learn the reason for Kok's visit.
Incidentally do we have a current update on the Marco van Hees-marshalled Dutchbat taskforce being mustered to defend the protected area of Radovan Karadzic? Back a year ago de-construct was reporting it as being 91 strong. I think at the time you had a very positive response from the Dutchbat III website moderator denouncing yet another Karadzic Hague defence team scam.
I was wondering myself what the heck he was doing there as he's not sounding very remorseful
@ Owen: All posts are located here. I recognize that Google Custom search for the SGB does not yield the best results, so I will be re-freshing the index. Instead, you can try searching regular Google.com, just add "site:srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com" + search keywords, try it here.
@ kanita: Former Dutchbat peacekeepers are worst of the worst. No wonder many Dutchbat scumbags sided with the Serbs; after all, the Netherlands is the most Islamophobic country in Europe. Approximately 100 of these Dutchbat scumbags have so far offered to testify on behalf of Radovan Karadzic.
Wow how do they sleep at night, how do any of the guilty sleep at night. They have to make themselves think their actions are justified somehow, and it's probably easier when you think being muslim means being subhuman (I am now thinking of their graffiti that you have posted)
There's nothing wrong with forgiveness; nobody needs that sort of hate, remember forgiving is not the same as forgetting.
Riley, in Bosnian language, "forgiveness" means the act of excusing a mistake or offense. We don't excuse genocides.
Ah, understood. Let me be clear that I do believe in taking revenge. However if someone is not going avenge their loved ones there's no point in holding to that hate; it just gives scum power over a person.
Dan, you should be careful about condemning the Dutchbat members so indiscriminately.
At the heart of the issue is the failure of the Dutch politicians who were responsible for sending out a force with what seems to have been a a large component of ill-trained and poorly-motivated conscripts to do a job that they had chosen to assume on political grounds.
The Dutch government did not strive to make them an effective force and it failed to provide them with the moral and military guidelines that embodied the core of their task - the responsibility to protect the citizens of Srebrenica.
Whatever the failings of Dutchbat III when they were put to the test, the groundwork for their failure had already been done by the Dutch and by UNPROFOR and the Security Council members who had not established an adequate contingency plan for responding to a foreseeable development - after many months of seeing the flow of supplies and reinforcements to Dutchbat strangled by the Serb control over access to the enclave.
A government commands its soldiers and is responsible for their preparation. The soldiers should have been aware of their responsibilities under all forms of international humanitarian and other law.
The Dutch are proud of their support for the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which in 1989 - less than six years before Srebrenica - became the first legally binding international convention affirming human rights for all children.
I have seen no evidence whatsoever that in ordering the refugees to lead the Potocari camp the Dutch soldiers showed any thought for their responsibility towards the male children they were delivering into the hands of Ratko Mladic.
Article 6
1. States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life.
2. States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.
Military forces - particularly those serving in an international mission - are supposed to be trained in their responsibilities under international law.
(continued)
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The responsibility of the Dutch government doesn't exonerate the Dutch military command. It was they who were responsible for implementing the training that Dutchbat so clearly lacked, and it was they who interpreted the responsibilities of their forces as involving no effort to avoid a clear and imminent threat to the lives of people in their care that might involve risk to the safety of their own troops.
Of course the safety of hostages - hostages in the full glare of international publicity - is an important consideration. But the Dutch commanders - Karremans and the superiors he appears to have been in contact with outside the UN chain of command - saw the safety of those hostages (and the political safety of a government accountable to a domestic electorate) as over-riding the responsibility they had assumed to protect defenceless civilians who were under an even more imminent threat to life.
The coarse racism and greedy opportunism reported on the part of members of the Dutchbat contingents and the relaxed relationships of a number of them with their Serb counterparts should not lead us to condemn all members of the force, some of whom seem to have made determined efforts to help refugees get from Srebrenica to what was thought to be the safety of Potocari and others of whom made serious efforts to document what was happening even if they felt powerless to intervene.
Above all, let's remember that there were members of Dutchbat who were alert and conscientious enough to take photographs, obviously at considerable personal risk. Which again raises the question - how was it that the Dutch command managed to "lose" those vitally important photographs? Has anyone ever been held responsible for that loss?
The unforgivable behaviour of the racists who happily collaborated with the Serb forces and the human failures of demoralised conscripts should not make us forget the efforts of individuals to do their human best. What we need to be clear about is where the responsibility for Dutchbat's failure lies and we need to be careful that apparent expressions of remorse are not used as the cloak for another exercise in official self-justification.
Riley, watch the B92 documentary Bosnia Argentaria - http://www.b92.net/video/video.php?nav_category=961&nav_id=413727 and listen to what Haris Silajdzic has to say, speaking at Potocari last summer (a little bit after halfway through)
The Netherlands Defence Academy - Nederlandse Defensie Academie - considers Ed Herman an authority worth linking to as a reference for "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre" - Geschiedenis - Oorlogen, conflicten, operaties 20e eeuw / Srebrenica
http://www.nederlandsedefensieacademie.nl/content/php/index.php?id=59&lang=NL&cat_id=700071&pad2=Links%20geselecteerde%20websites&imgvar=csb&st=Bibliotheek%20NLDA
(they partially compensate with a link to Balkan Witness collection of "Articles on the Balkans Conflict", but this is a particularly clear case of where the principle of equalisation is not valid)
When will justice be given to these people who had to stand and watch their loved ones being murdered while the international community failed them.
Let the international community do the right thing now and hunt down these creatures who are responsible and humiliate them with a public execution.The time for talking is over.
Get the facts and evidence and when there is proof that each one of these beasts are guilty take them out and hang them in public and let the crows clean up the mess.
for 15 years other people have blaimed the dutch for the death of 8100 people. they didn't kill them. the serbs did. the dutchbatters were equiped with weapons that werent suitable for the job (uzi's vs ak-47's) the ammo that they used was there since the beginning of the operation so the guns jammed a lot. the equipment was worthless. so it isn't surprising that they had to give up the enclave to the serbs. if they decided to fight then they would have all been killed. and the faith of the 8100 bosnians wouldnt have changed. it was probaly the only thing they could do. i dont know anything about the porn or the drinking so i wont comment about that but you have to ask your selves this question: what would i have done in that situation?
A Dutchman
Dutchman, in the first place the Dutch government sent out an force that was inadequately equipped and trained force which seemed not to have been made aware of its responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions and the rules of war, international humanitarian law and even humanitarian instruments on whose adoption the Dutch had prided themselves such as the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Dutchbat contingent seems to have failed to do the most basic intelligence gathering and analysis that should have alerted it to the "clear and present danger" posed to the people in its trust.
While some of the racism and other forms of contempt shown by the contingent towards the people of Srebrenica was no different from what might have been expected from any other national group in adverse circumstances, that doesn't excuse it. It may be unfair for the Dutch to be singled out above any of the other UN contingents whose questionable behaviour poses serious questions for the UN system but that's life. When things go wrong you are what the spotlight sees.
And when the protectors failed to protect the people they were there to save, the question has to be asked whether they would have behaved differently had the people they were protecting been different people.
To be fair an already inadequately equipped Dutchbat III may have been weakened by the stranglehold campaign conducted by the VRS during the months preceding the takeover but even within the scope of what was feasible they do not seem to have offered any adequate show of resistance to probing attacks that might have made Mladic think twice about the final onslaught. Whether that was the fault of the Dutch or the fault of the UN perhaps that's for others more informed than me to judge.
However once they had failed in their task of protecting the enclave they faced another challenge, what to do about the civilians for whom they knew they were the last hope of survival. And in the end I don't think it takes military expertise to say that Dutchbat was a military force that chose to protect itself and knowingly abandoned thousands of civilians to their death.
(cont.)
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Certainly the Dutch were let down by the international community and the finger of blame should certainly not stop at the Dutch, it should point all the way up into the Security Council, the NATO and UNPROFOR command structures and the senior levels of the UN, but should it pass over the people who in the end decided to cooperate with genocide?
I'm not a brave person myself and I certainly wouldn't dare suggest that if faced with the same terrible dilemma I would have been any more courageous than those unfortunate conscripts (though I hope I might not have shown the same enthusiastic willingness to assist that some are supposed to have shown). But that's not the point.
Individual soldiers are part of a command structure. Dutchbat were part of the UNPROFOR command and they also seem to have sustained effective contact with their own national authorities. The Dutch authorities who told Dutchbat's officers that there were to be no body bags returning to the Netherlands sealed the fate of the people entrusted to their troops' care.
Some of the Dutchbat soldiers were clearly aware of what was going on and did their best to abide by what they knew was their moral and legal obligation towards the refugees. They were betrayed by the people from whom they should have had support - their military superiors and their democratic representatives.
What in the end happened to the photographic evidence that was provided? What happened to the list of names of the male Bosniaks handed over to Mladic? Why did Dutchbat not fulfil its legal duty to report on the crimes it witnessed? Trivially but significantly, why was the Zagreb party arranged, rather than an adequate and honest briefing of the international press?
Dutchbat ordered the refugees who they had accepted into their trust inside the base at Potocari to hand themselves over to an army that they knew was intent on slaughter, turning a blind eye to crimes that they already knew were being committed right in front of them. Of course resistance would have been potentially very dangerous. But if you don't resist and as a result thousands of people die that's a responsibility you have to live with and work with.
The problem is that the Dutch are reluctant to live and work with that. To the best of my knowledge the Dutch have never officially apologised to the people of Srebrenica for their role in the genocide. They have strongly resisted accepting any responsibility whatsoever for the fate of the people they ordered to hand themselves over to butchery.
Instead they have tried to distance themselves from that responsibility.
In the last resort Dutchbat were the representatives of the rule of law and effectively the last bastions of civilisation. They simply crumbled, and it was they who told the people at Potocari what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights meant in practice.
We in other countries have to be prepared to accept the blame for those things that we were responsible for. The Dutch have to accept the blame for what they were responsible for at Potocari.
And Dutchman, in case you think I'm turning a blind eye homeward, I don't have any qualms in saying that John Major and Douglas Hurd equally owe an apology to the people of Srebrenica. But one man's crime doesn't excuse another's.
I'm 95% sure that the obscene graffiti is not made by the Dutch garrison.
Do you really think that the officers in command of the Dutch taskforce would allow racist texts to be written on the wall of their encampment? Do you think we are like some barbarian tribe without proper military codes of conduct?
As the photographs show, the encampment is easily accessible by anyone, and the graffiti could thus be written by anyone. Only requirement: A marker pen. Not very hard to come by.
Besides: most obscene written text is in very bad English. Besides the fact that English is taught in the Netherlands from an early age, making it hard to believe that Dutch soldiers would make such basic spelling- and grammar errors, Dutchmen usually write things in Dutch. All the graffiti or text I've seen that wás written in Dutch was not offensive in any way (from a menu to a simple soldiers verse).
The better drawings, like the devil, may have been made by the garrison-soldiers but that can hardly be called offensive; the bad-written offensive text are very likely not.
Without proper proof this is just slander.
The Dutch garrison was not equipped for fighting and English and French air-support was bluntly refused.
What would you have expected the soldiers to do? Throw rocks at the tanks?
The whole affair is a tragedy, but don't vent your frustration by slandering an army that was simply unable to make any difference in this matter because their multinational superiors misinterpreted the situation.
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