Dutch Honour 'Disgraced' Soldiers

Taken from The Daily Telegraph, UK, 06/12/2006
By David Rennie

A decision by the Dutch government to award special medals to its peacekeepers who failed to protect the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica during the Yugoslav civil war has prompted a formal protest from the Bosnian authorities.

The Dutch ambassador to Sarajevo, Karel Vosskuler, was summoned to receive the protest from the three-member presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Dutch defence minister, Henk Kamp, had honoured some 500 members of the 850-strong unit — known as "Dutchbat" — on Monday.

He had told them that the badges were a "visible acknowledgement" that in Srebrenica they had "an extraordinarily difficult task".

During the ceremony, in the northern city of Assen, Mr Kamp said: "Dutchbat has for years wrongly been held responsible for what happened in the enclave."

During the Bosnian war, Muslims crowded into Srebrenica, which was guarded by a Dutch army unit under a United Nations mandate.

But in July 1995, about 450 Dutch soldiers surrendered Srebrenica after failing to persuade a French UN commander to send air support.

Some Dutch troops were accused of assisting Bosnian Serb forces as they separated men and boys from women, and herded them on to buses. More than 8,000 Muslim males were subsequently massacred, in an act classified as genocide by UN war crimes prosecutors.

The Dutch troops returned home to allegations of cowardice and incompetence. An independent study in 2002 cleared them of most blame, noting they were outnumbered, lightly armed and under instructions to fire only in self-defence. The report prompted the government of the then prime minister, Wim Kok, to resign.