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Essay on Ethnic Cleansing in Srebrenica
Everyone agrees that it's a lot less costly to prevent conflict than to react to it after the event. But very few policy makers ever seem to take the force of this observation seriously enough to do something about it. Maybe they would if they stopped now and again to do some calculations.
On 11 July 1995, the east Bosnian city of Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian-Serb army (BSA). This resulted in a mass exodus from the enclave; approximately 7,000 men have since been killed or are missing. The Srebrenica massacre was one of the most shocking crimes against humanity during the horrific Bosnian war - and the largest single massacre of civilians on European soil since World War II.The people of Srebrenica lived in a ‘safe area’ as labeled by the United Nations.
They were convinced that those same UN forces that carried the word ‘protection’ in their name would protect them: UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force). The UNPROFOR battalion in Srebrenica at the time of the fall was the Dutch battalion, Dutchbat.Lulled into a false sense of security by the UN promise, the population became the ultimate victims of genocide in July 1995. This started a painful and wearisome debate in the Netherlands. The sensitivity surrounding the Dutch role in the Srebrenica massacre was confirmed recently by the uncharacteristically sharp responses of Dutch politicians to criticism leveled at Dutchbat in the report of a French Parliamentary Commission.
Following a number of attempts to clarify the events, the government asked the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) to perform an independent enquiry. Almost seven years have passed since the massacre and more than five years since the government decided to launch an enquiry.It is important to ascertain whether there were signs of an attack during the mission......
