There will never be “closure” for the small ill-equipped battalion of Dutch peacekeepers left to protect 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the UN “safe haven” of Srebrenica in July 1995. Looking back, it was the original mission impossible. Almost 30 years on, many of them are still traumatised.
What happened last Saturday though may be a start. At a quiet military base near Arnhem, prime minister Mark Rutte apologised on behalf of the state to those who remain of Dutchbat III. Contrary to repeated court rulings over the years, he told them, the blood of Srebrenica was not on their hands.
What allowed Rutte to make that unqualified apology was that time has shown definitively that Col Thomas Karremans and his 300 or so men were patsies, set up to shoulder the blame for the horror of Srebrenica in one of the most shocking examples of modern-day “great power” perfidy.
In the shadow of another vicious war on European soil today, it’s timely to remember what happened in the hill town Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia — but also what happened in what used to be, in another era, the “smoke-filled rooms” where political players rolled the dice.
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[ Inside Srebrenica: old scars, new woundsOpens in new window ]
The Dutchbat mission was to defend a 10sq km enclave with a few hundred lightly armed troops, facing the overwhelming fire of thousands of battle-hardened Bosnian Serbs, led by Gen Ratko Mladic and backed by the notorious slash-and-burn paramilitaries, “The Scorpions”.
As the Serbs advanced, Karremans sent as many as 10 urgent messages over five days calling for Nato air support which — inexplicably at the time — never arrived. In one case he was told the request had been submitted on the wrong type of form.
In the end, Karremans ordered his troops to stand aside. What followed was the worst and most systematic butchery on European soil since the second World War.
The 8,000 Muslims, all males from 16 to 60, fighting age, were loaded on to trucks and buses, driven off to isolated fields and shot dead in industrial-scale executions subsequently judged by two international courts to have been premeditated genocide.
So, although there were many in positions of power who knew better, that became the narrative, in the Netherlands and overseas: that the Dutch had “bottled it”, failed to stand and fight, were cowards. So vilified was Karremans personally that he’s spent much of the time since abroad.
Labour prime minister Wim Kok resigned in 2002 as a means of taking national responsibility.
Then in 2015, just days before the 20th anniversary of the massacre, the Srebrenica puzzle began to fit together.
In a late-night tweet, Bosnia’s former ambassador to the UN, Mohammed Sacirbey, warned the Dutch government that it had been “set up” by its “allies” in a deal done privately in Washington.
Nato air assaults
A few days later, a TV documentary entitled, Why Srebrenica had to Fall, alleged that on May 28th, 1995, the Clinton administration, after consultation by phone with French president Jacques Chirac and British prime minister John Major, had decided to suspend Nato air strikes “for the time being”.
That was because of fears for the lives of 450 UN peacekeepers, mainly British and French, who had been taken hostage by the Serbs. Memorably, the hostages’ blue helmets were chained together in strategic locations to warn off potential Nato air assaults.
The White House decision was committed to writing but was otherwise taken “in silence”, with no public statement, apparently so that Clinton and his allies would not appear weak.
Clinton’s former national security adviser Sandy Berger, a key on-the-record interviewee for the documentary, confirmed the secret three-party agreement — which he described as, in hindsight, as “not a productive decision”.
So, at the head of his waiting army, Mladic was fully aware there would be no consequences when he overran Srebrenica.
The Dutch government, however, was never told.
On Saturday, Karremans stood in the middle of his troops, no uniform, his trademark “officer’s moustache” of the old days now gone, replaced by a grey stubble, looking all his 72 years.
He did not interact with Rutte. He said he was glad for his men that an apology had come, but for him, personally, it was “too late”.
There was undisguised bitterness too. “I made some mistakes, but considering what I’ve lived through for 27 years, I think a personal apology would have been appropriate.”
