Hiya!

The UN absolutely did not 'let' the Srebrenica genocide occur in terms of 'intending to or allowing' the fall of the town and subsequent genocidal killings undertaken by Republika Srpska. The UN has, however, been heavily criticised for its poor handling of the situation that developed in Srebrenica between April, 1993 and the town's fall to Serbian forces on July 10-11, 1995. The video is correct in stating that UN forces allowed the town to fall without putting up a fight, but deliberately ignores the context of the situation and sounds like a conspiratorial attempt to paint the UN as willing murderers. To properly understand the reasons for the UN's failure to defend Srebrenica, we need to examine the wider situation surrounding Srebrenica prior to its fall in July 1995.

The town of Srebrenica and the region surrounding it were established as a 'safe zone' for Bosniak Muslims in the context of the wider Bosnian War. Prior to the safe zone's establishment in April of 1993, the Bosnian War had already seen widespread, systematic ethnic-cleansing, forced displacement and ethnically-motivated killing by both sides. Srebrenica had changed hands between Bosnian government and Serbian forces throughout the first half of 1992, but following its recapture by government forces in May, 1992, the town and surrounding region formed an isolated enclave of government control, surrounded by regions controlled by Republika Srpska. The appalling treatment of Bosniak civilians by Serbian forces in the surrounding region, including forced starvation, rape and masscres, resulted in a huge flow of Bosniak refugees into the relative safety of the Srebrenica enclave. By early 1993 the humanitarian situation within the town had become appalling as an effective siege by Serbian forces resulted in starvation and rampant disease.

In April, 1993, the UN acted to actively extend protection over the Srebrenica enclave. Fearing that the town's fall would lead to the massacre of Bosniak civilians by Serbian forces, the UN established a garrison to protect the enclave under the auspices of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and negotiated a treaty for the disarmament of Bosnian forces within the town and the withdrawal of Serbian forces threatening the security of the enclave.

Although the UNPROFOR garrison - a force of Dutch soldiers, roughly 450 strong and supported by armoured vehicles and air support (and hereafter known as Dutchbat) was successfully established inside the enclave, the disarmament-and-withdrawal treaty negotiated by the UN was in practice ignored by both Bosnian and Serbian forces. The Bosnian garrison of the town, if it can be called that, the 28th mountain division, was in a horrendous state by April 1993. It was barely cohesive, and its soldiers were lacking training and suffering from shortages equipment weapons and uniforms - as well as being affected by the appalling humanitarian conditions within the enclave. By comparison, Serb forces besieging the enclave - some ~1,000-2,000 in April, 1993 (estimates vary) had access to tanks and heavy artillery. Dutchbat was not directed to disarm Bosnian forces within the town until Serbian forces withdrew to less threatening positions. As the Serbs never withdrew, the 28th remained, by and large, armed. The safe zone that had been established in April 1993 persisted into 1995, with the vast refugee population of the town almost entirely reliant on supply convoys. Bosnian forces from within the town frequently low-level raids into surrounding Serbian-controlled regions, attempting to secure desperately needed supplies, while Serbian forces maintained an effective siege against the enclave, disrupting supply convoys and frequently engaging in war crimes against Bosnians in the surrounding regions.

By early 1995, this already dire situation had deteriorated not just in terms of humanitarian conditions, but also strategically. It had become apparent to all involved that the Dutchbat garrison assigned to protect Srebrenica was in reality incapable of defending the town in the face of a determined assault. Dutchbat was now critically low on fuel and ammunition, and running low on food and medicine. Meanwhile, the Bosnian 28th Mountain Division had effectively ceased to exist as a cohesive unit, effectively dissolving into the morass of the Srebrenica enclave as the situation worsened and command-and-control became impossible. In this context, Dutchbat stood little chance of defending the enclave against the 1500+ Serbian troops^A, supported by armoured vehicles and artillery, that were preparing to assault the town.

When Serbian forces launched an offensive against Srebrenica on July 6, 1995, this strategic situation came to a head. Dutchbat outposts around the town came under attack, and faced with the dilemma of withdrawing or risking annihilation, Dutchbat forces withdrew in the face of the advancing Serbs, allowing several outposts surrounding the town to fall. By July 10, Serbian troops were encroaching on the town proper. Dutchbat once again attempted to dissuade the Serbs by firing warning shots, but knew that, if they began actively defending against the Serbs and attempting to 'shoot to kill,' so to speak, then the battalion would likely be surrounded and annihilated in short order, and the enclave would fall anyway. Within this context, Dutch forces abandoned Srebrenica to the Serbs, attempting to begin the evacuation of women and children. They would, however, cooperate in handing over male Bosniak refugees under their protection to Serbian forces over the following days - actions that resulted in the deaths of those handed over, and have attracted widespread criticism.

In the aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide, Dutchbat received heavy criticism for their failure to defend the enclave, but far more reasonable criticisms were leveled at UNPROFOR for allowing the strategically catastrophic situation of July, 1995 to develop. Numerous studies and inquiries in the aftermath of the killings have concluded that Dutchbat had been given an effectively impossible task and provided with far too few resources with which to undertake it. UNPROFOR's failure to reinforce Dutchbat with additional forces, secure its supply lines (or indeed those of the Srebrenica enclave itself) or provide the garrison with adequate air support meant that any Dutchbat attempt to mount a determined defence against the Serbs would end in slaughter - and deterrence that can't deter isn't very useful.

To sum up, UNPROFOR and more locally Dutchbat did not plan, 'allow' or intend for the fall of Srebrenica. Dutchbat did everything within its power to deter the capture of the enclave by Republika Srpska, short of instigating a military engagement that would have resulted in the battalion being annihilated and the town falling anyway. At the higher level, however, the inaction and failure of UNPROFOR to provide Dutchbat with the resources or strategic support it needed to effectively defend Srebrenica was a critical contributing factor to the fall of the Enclave and the genocide that followed.

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Sources

A - Directly involved in the attack. /u/Polybios provides more accurate figures for the total number of Serb troops within the Srebrenica reigon.

NIOD Report on Srebrenica.

Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35: The Fall of Srebrenica. Warning, large PDF.

Rijsdijk, Erna. "The politics of hard knowledge: uncertainty, intelligence failures, and the ‘last minute genocide’ of Srebrenica." Review of International Studies 37, 2011. 2221-2235.

Spijkers, Otto. "Responsibility of the Netherlands for the Genocide in Srebrenica : The Nuhanović and Mothers of Srebrenica Cases Compared." Journal of international peacekeeping 18, 2014, 281.

I have the same answer as /u/Elm11 but with a slightly different perspective :)

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On the 6th of July 1995 Srebrenica was attacked by Bosnian-Serb forces. Over the next 10 days, the Bosnian-Serbs expelled some 23000 Bosnian-Muslim women and children from the area and killed some 8000 Bosnian-Muslim men. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has ruled that these actions constituted genocide.

How true is it that the UN let the Serb forces advance without putting up fight? Mostly true, with some caveats. Did they allow the Serbians to massacre a large part of the population? That's hard to say, as it's unclear when exactly it became clear to the UN that a massacre was occuring, and what could realistically be done about it at that point. Did the US/UK/Dutch forces plan this? Absolutely not. The international community made many mistakes during the Bosnian war, and in hindsight it's clear they set themselves up to fail, but they didn't realise that at the time.

Note I'll be using "Bosnia" as a short-hand for "Bosnia-Hercegovina" throughout this post. Convenience trumps accuracy in this regard.

Setting the stage

When Yugoslavia fell apart in constituent states, war engulfed the region. In Slovenia and Croatia the situation stabilised relatively quickly, but in Bosnia a drawn-out war was developing between Bosnian-Muslims and Bosnian-Serbs, the latter being supported by Serbian artillery and airforce, as well as irregular Serbian units.[1] The international community, chiefly the European Community and the United Nations, got involved by negotiating cease-fires and truces, but none held up. Nonetheless, an international peacekeeping force - UNPROFOR (United Nations PROtection FORce) - was sent to the region.

A lot has been written on Srebrenica already and I'm not going to completely reinvent the wheel. Allow me to use large quote explaining UNPROFOR's situation [1]:

UNPROFOR's tasks in the disputed areas of Croatia were of simple peacekeeping kind. Its personnel was strictly neutral, while the local parties agreed to its presence in a buffer zone. In Bosnia, however, both the tasks of UNPROFOR and the prevailing situation were different. First of all, there was no peace to keep. Second, UNPROFOR's presence was not welcomed by all parties. Even its neutral role was questioned as, according to the logic of ethnic war, bringing humanitarian aid to the civilians of an other ethnic community, was equated to augmenting the stamina of the enemy. Consequently, in Bosnia, UNPROFOR was hardly tolerated by the stronger party. In the end, it was simply brushed aside when this party decided to eliminate the civilians UNPROFOR was supposed to help.

In Bosnia UNPROFOR was certainly not keeping the peace, and it was not enforcing one either. The international community, however, was too divided to redress this unfortunate situation.

UNPROFOR units were sent to Bosnian-Muslim enclaves in Bosnian-Serb territory. These enclaves were nominally demilitarised and were called "safe areas" by the UN. Srebrenica was once such safe area. The main UNPROFOR presence in Srebrenica was Dutch military unit, about 500 strong, called DUTCHBAT. It had to be supplied through Bosnian-Serb territory though...

The lead-up to the attack

Early in the morning of July 6th, 1995, a Bosnian-Serb army (BSA) attacked Srebrenica. The Bosnian-Serbs had up to 12000 soldiers, about 3000 of which from Serbia. The Bosnian-Muslim Army (BIH) had 3000 men defending. DUTCHBAT, as mentioned, had a total of about 500 men spread through the enclave. Their situation was difficult though, as Metselaar explains [2]:

The Dutch UN battalion was no real contester, handicapped as it was that some 150 of its members were unable to return to the enclave as a result of a well-planned blockade of the BSA, that only 16% of the operational requirement for ammunition was available, that its fuel supplies were mostly exhausted, that there was a structural lack of fresh food, drinking water, and (partly as a result of all these problems) that the morale of the battalion had become low.

Another problem was the complicated structure of UN command in the region. At the end of July 6th, the UNPROFOR force commander reported to the UN administration that it was "overall a quiet day militarily". Evidently the severity of the situation wasn't clear yet at UNPROFOR HQ. This is probably because communication from DUTCHBAT in Srebrenica had to routed through Sector North East in Tuzla, via Bosnia Herzegovina Command in Sarajevo, to UNPROFOR in Zagreb. Of course it didn't help that DUTCHBAT just hours before the attack (and after observing a convoy of tanks and APCs!) reported that "the situation is calm and stable. We expect no major changes for the next 24 hours."[3]

July 6th

In the morning of July 6th, the BSA conducted three infantry attacks in the south-eastern corner of the enclave. These were all repelled by the BIH. The BSA responded with heavy artillery fire, hitting a DUTCHBAT observation post in the process. The BSA infantry attacks continued in the east of the enclave; the BIH commander asked for assistance from DUTCHBAT, but that was refused. This angered the BIH, as they had understood the UN presence as meaning that the UN forces would help defend the enclave. However, politicians had severely restricted UNPROFOR's ability to (re)act by imposing strict Rules of Engagement - DUTCHBAT could only use their weapons for self-defence.

For instance, the Dutch commander Karremans did request Close Air Support (i.e. air bombardment) after the attack on the observation post. UNPROFOR command refused the request, since the rules of engagement stipulated that air support could only provided if UN forces were under fire. Since the observation post was no longer being fired upon (it was already heavily damaged), no air support could be provided.

July 8th

July 7th was relatively quiet, but on July 8th the fighting intensified. Heavy artillery fire forced the BIH to fall back. They asked DUTCHBAT to give them access to the weapons which had been collected as part of the demilitarisation effort, but DUTCHBAT refused.

BSA tanks entered the enclave in the south-east. They fired on BIH positions and a DUTCHBAT observation post. BSA soldiers approached the observation post under a white flag, and told the Dutch soldiers that they had 10 minutes to leave. Since several tanks had trained their guns on the observation position, the observation post commander decided to retreat.

As the DUTCHBAT soldiers were retreating from the observation post in an APC, they were stopped by BIH soldiers constructing a barricade just 200 metres away. The BIH soldiers demanded the Dutch soldiers stayed. Not wanting to serve as human shields, the observation post commander ordered the APC to close the hatches and break the barricade. A BIH soldier responded by throwing a hand grenade before the hatches were fully closed, killing one Dutch soldier.

In the afternoon the DUTCHBAT commander once again requested close air support. The request was once again denied, but UNPROFOR did accept a NATO offer to fly a couple of fighter jets over the area as a show of force. An attempt by DUTCHBAT to re-establish an observation post near the lost observation post was stopped by BIH soldiers. In the evening another observation post was lost to the BSA. Civilians all across the enclave started fleeing to the city of Srebrenica proper.

(continued below)