Srebrenica genocide: Netherlands apologize for the first time

In 1995 Serbs murdered at least 8000 Bosniaks in and around Srebrenica. The Dutch UN blue helmets did not resist. The Netherlands apologized for the first time at the commemoration.

27 years after the Srebrenica genocide, the Netherlands has apologized to the families of the victims for the first time. “The international community failed to protect the people of Srebrenica,” Defense Minister Kasja Ollongren said at the memorial service in Potocari, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“As part of this community, the Dutch government also bears some of the political responsibility for the situation in which this failure could have happened. We deeply apologize for that.”

Blue Helmets did not resist

Srebrenica was a UN protection zone during the Balkan War. The Dutch UN unit Dutchbat was supposed to protect thousands of Bosnian refugees in the enclave in the summer of 1995. But on July 11, Serbian units led by General Ratko Mladic overran the city. The lightly armed blue helmets did not resist.

In the final days of the Bosnian war, the Serbs murdered at least 8,000 Bosniak boys and men, most of whom were Bosnian.

Buried in mass graves

The soldiers buried the victims in mass graves. They later dug some of them up again with excavators and distributed them to other graves in order to cover up the evidence of the war crime. The remains of the killed boys and men were partly torn apart, so that isolated body parts are still being found in mass graves in and around Srebrenica, which are assembled and identified by DNA analysis.

The Srebrenica massacre was the bloody low point of the Bosnian war after the breakup of Yugoslavia. It was considered the worst war crime in Europe since World War II.

“Facing This Story Directly”

The Dutch government has previously admitted its own political mistakes, but has always refused a clear apology. “We cannot take the suffering away from you,” said the defense minister. “But what we can do is face that story head-on.”

Ollongren also stressed that the Bosnian Serb leaders were to blame for the genocide. The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague had sentenced the Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Mladic to life imprisonment.

50 recently identified victims buried

On the 27th anniversary of the massacre, thousands of victims in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina commemorated those days. They also attended the funeral of 50 recently identified victims of the massacre.

Newly identified victims are buried annually on the anniversary of the beginning of the mass murder in the cemetery at the Potocari memorial just outside Srebrenica. 6,652 victims are now buried in Potocari, 237 were buried elsewhere at the request of the families, and more than 1,000 are considered missing.

The EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, High Representative Christian Schmidt and Bundestag Vice President Aydan Özoguz also attended the commemoration.