‘It Was Hell’: Dutch Troops Recall Failure to Stop Srebrenica Deaths

The failure of the international community to protect the so-called 'safe zone' of Srebrenica in July 1995 is a black mark in the history of peacekeeping operations across the world.

Much of the controversy that remains today surrounds the debate around the role of the UN and other state actors in not preventing the killings of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.

Last month, a court in the Netherlands ruled that the Dutch state was 10 per cent responsible for the deaths of 350 of the men who were killed by Bosnian Serb forces, bringing the actions of the Dutch UN peacekeeping force in Srebrenica back into the spotlight.

DutchBat III, so called because it was the third of several Dutch Army contingents to serve as UN peacekeepers in the Srebrenica enclave, arrived in January 1995. The battalion was under-supplied, under-equipped and its superiors at the UN command in Sarajevo were unwilling to given it extensive support.

Its mandate was not clearly defined, and Dutch military officials had made no efforts to procure detailed information about what was going on in the Srebrenica area. All this created an impossible situation for the Dutch troops who were tasked with implementing their orders to watch over the UN-declared 'safe zone', which had been encircled by Bosnian Serb forces, without using force except for in self-defence.

When the Bosnian Serbs seized Srebrenica, the DutchBat III troops, who were based in an old battery factory in nearby Potocari, were powerless to prevent them.

The Serbs announced an evacuation of the Bosniak women and children and said the male Bosniak refugees would be taken to safety later, but instead they were killed.

What follows are testimonies from some of the peacekeepers that served in...