CW: Graphic violence against children
This quote from the Wikipedia entry from the Srebenica massacre really hit me hard: "There was a woman with a small baby a few months old. A Chetnik told the mother that the child must stop crying. When the child did not stop crying, he snatched the child away and cut its throat. Then he laughed. There was a Dutch soldier there who was watching. He did not react at all. "
There are a few other instances detailed by eyewitnesses of Dutch Troops ignoring what was happening.
Simply put... why? Has there ever been an explanation for how they could just stand there? Are these eyewitness reports accurate?
Alright, I'm not a historian but I am a Dutch student in International Law and therefore Srebrenica has come up a few times. I'm going to base my comment largely on the Human Rights Watch Report that was written up shortly after the massacre because it was still on my computer and seems to touch upon all the points that I was taught at the time: if there's relevant points missing from it please, please someone feel free to correct me. Okay, here we go.
The fall of Srebrenica was a complicated 'perfect storm' of terrible decisions amidst a terrible ethnic conflict, and the jury is still out on which parties were responsible for the terrible massacre and failure of peacekeeping that took place there. I mean that literally: the Dutch 'Hoge Raad' (Supreme Court) ruled on the matter less than two weeks ago, placing partial blame with the Dutch State for what took place there, however the case is likely to continue on to the ECtHR. There is a general consensus that can be found on what factors contributed to what took place there, however.
The first major factor is that the mandate for the peacekeeping forces was unclear from the start. Srebrenica was one of a number of demilitarized zones (meaning the residents had handed over their weapons to UN troops, a stipulation from the Bosnian Serbs for leaving these areas alone), after which UN troops were allowed to stay in the enclave. These areas were declared to be 'safe areas' by the UN security council. However the big question was what amount of force was allowed to UN troops in these enclaves. The UN had stated that the use of force would be allowed for the protection of the safe areas, but the general interpretation of this mandate became that UN troops inside the enclave could only use force to defend themselves, NOT the civilian population, and that further use of force would have to be delivered through air support.
This interpretation was partially motivated by the second major factor, and that was the bleak reality that there were not nearly enough troops in the area to safeguard the safezones. The UN had estimated that 34.000 troops were necessary for the full protection of the areas: only 3.500 were deployed (and that was for all six safezones, only 340 troops of the Dutch Batallion -Dutchbat- were stationed in Srebrenica). The NIOD (a Dutch research institute for war-holocaust-and genocide studies who wrote a 1300 page report on the massacre) later concluded that the Dutch government was mostly making a political statement by sending these troops and never accounted properly for the possibility of serious armed conflict, leaving troops underequipped and with contradicting orders.
In the years that followed the safezones became overcrowded and turned into what HRW refers to as 'ethnic ghetto's'. Bosnian Serbs kept sporadically commiting acts of violence on the fringes of these ghetto's, and as a response from the ground (and increasingly, from the air) failed to appear this emboldened the Serbs in ramping up their attacks on the safe areas.
This brings us to the third factor, and that was the failure of UN- and NATO forces to actually follow through on their promise of air support for the ground troops. Air support that was to be provided by US, UK and French forces was in practice kept to a minimum during the stay of UN troops in Bosnia. There are a large number of theories and explanations for why this exactly occured but going into to this too much is beyond the scope of this explanation right now, but safe to say is that it became quite evident to Serbian military command that the threats of air support were somewhat disingenious.
Then in 1995 after a number of trumped of charges from the Bosnian Serb government of attacks emanating from Bosnians military operating from Srebrenica (it should be noted that there was a sizable Bosnian military force in the area at least), they launched a full-scale assault on the city. Accounts vary, but at least a few thousand troops and dozens of tanks and heavy mortar equipment were deployed in this attack. The population of the area floods to the Srebrenica enclave, unknowingly worsening the coming massacre.
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