Court holds Dutch UN force liable for some Srebrenica deaths

(Vatican Radio) A court on Wednesday cleared the Netherlands of liability in the deaths of most of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims slain in the Srebrenica massacre 19 years ago.

The court did, however, order the nation to compensate the families of more than 300 men who were turned over to Bosnian Serb forces and later killed.

Christopher Wells reports:

In an emotionally charged hearing at a civil court in The Hague, Presiding Judge Larissa Alwin said Dutch U.N. peacekeepers should have known that the men deported from the Dutch compound by Bosnian Serb forces on July 13, 1995, would be slain because there was already evidence of the Serbs committing war crimes.

“By cooperating in the deportation of these men, Dutchbat acted unlawfully,” Alwin said, referring to the name of the Dutch UN battalion.

The victims were among thousands of Muslims killed after Bosnian Serb forces commanded by Gen. Ratko Mladic overran the town of Srebrenica on July 11 in what was to become the bloody climax to the 1992-95 Bosnian war that claimed 100,000 lives.

Two days later, the outnumbered Dutch peacekeepers bowed to pressure from Mladic's troops and forced thousands of Muslim families out of their fenced-off compound. Bosnian Serb forces sorted the Muslims by gender, then trucked the males away and began executing them. Their bodies were plowed into hastily made mass graves in what international courts have ruled was genocide.

But the ruling cleared Dutch troops of responsibility in the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men who fled into the forests around Srebrenica and were later rounded up and murdered by Serb forces, saying “Dutchbat cannot be held liable for their fate.”