‘Srebrenica’ will long remain a symbol for the mismatch between the great ambitions and limited margins of Dutch foreign policy with regard to the Yugoslav crisis between July 1990 and July 1995. In July 1995 (Bosnian) Serb forces attacked the enclave which had been declared a ‘safe area’ by the United Nations Security Council and overran the Dutch peacekeepers who had been stationed there precisely to deter such attacks. Subsequently, Serb soldiers and paramilitaries murdered some seven thousand Muslim men. For the Netherlands, the fall of Srebrenica and the subsequent massacre and, in particular, the feeling of impotence that had accompanied the events as they unfolded, constituted the nadir in five years of involvement in the Yugoslav crisis.

This book is not so much concerned with the fall of Srebrenica itself. There are three reasons for this. First, a substantial body of literature on the fall of Srebrenica is now available (and more is being produced), including a book authored by Jan Willem Honig and myself to which this book would have little to add. Second, I am employed in the Dutch Foreign Ministry's European Affairs Department as a desk officer with responsibilities covering a wide range of issues regarding the former Yugoslavia. Given the need for a clear demarcation line between knowledge obtained as an academic and the knowledge acquired as an official, it seemed wise to limit the period covered by this book to a period well before my entry into the Foreign Ministry, thus excluding e.g. the 1999 Kosovo crisis. The third reason for confining the period covered by this book to the years 1990-1995 involved the perceived need for consistency in the use of primary source material. The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs was kind enough to allow me to study its official records covering the period of 1990 until well into 1994, by which time the parameters for the Dutch involvement in the events of July 1995 had been firmly set. The documents covering the actual fall of Srebrenica had already been claimed by the official Srebrenica investigation by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), whose work I did not seek to interfere with.