It Ain't Over Till It's Over

In July 1995, Bosnian-Serb forces occupied the town of Srebrenica, a UN safe haven in the Yugoslavian civil war, after a long siege and a brief military campaign. The Dutch military contingent (Dutchbat), the UN protector of the Muslim enclave, surrendered and was allowed a safe retreat. On return, their families, the prime minister, and the Crown Prince welcomed the Dutch troops as national heroes. For the minister of defense, who had spent several days and nights in the government bunker in The Hague from where the Dutch military commanded the besieged troops, the crisis was finally over – or so he thought.

After taking over the enclave, the Bosnian-Serbian troops commanded by Ratko Mladic killed thousands of captives who had been under Dutch protection. The world soon learned that 7,000 men had been murdered, many of them while the Dutch battalion was anxiously awaiting its safe passage home. When the atrocities came to the fore, Dutch sentiment changed quickly. Media reports asserted that the Dutch soldiers had done very little to defend the enclave. Rumors began to circulate to the effect that the Dutch had condoned and even cooperated with the Serbs, thus facilitating the ethnic cleansing.

The Dutch minister of defense, Joris Voorhoeve, would spend the remainder of his political career defending the decision to surrender the enclave. Various investigations were conducted, yet doubts lingered on in the public mind. Finally, under pressure, the prime minister decided to appoint an official inquiry by the National Institute of War Studies. When it reported in the spring of 2002, just before scheduled elections, the report cleared the army of the cowardice charges but roundly criticized the government's decision to send Dutch troops into such a hazardous and badly supported UN mission. The government resigned. Seven years after Srebrenica, the political crisis was finally over.

The civil and criminal court battles continued, however. The “mothers of Srebrenica” proved unrelenting in their efforts to seek justice. Dutch and European courts knocked back their claims, but a Dutch court ruled in 2013 that the Dutchbat squadron did bear legal (though not criminal) liability for the deportations and subsequent killing of Bosnian Muslim men. The Srebrenica tragedy had become a wound that kept bleeding.