Mission Failed

The official Dutch report into the Srebenica massacre says the Dutch Government and the United Nations must share responsibility for the killing of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebenica by Serb forces in 1995.

The Netherlands government, its army and the UN were all to blame for the massacre, the report said. Prepared by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), it srongly criticises the Dutch government for sending poorly prepared troops to a volatile area without proper planning and preparation.

The darkest chapter

The United Nations had declared the town safe but it fell to the Serbs without the 110- Dutch blue berets firing a shot.

The UN is accused of failing to give the contingent the support they needed to defend the local population.

Prime responsibility for the massacre is assigned to Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, who has so far evaded a war crimes warrant.

But former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, on trial at the Hague, is not linked to the massacre by the makers of the report.

Mission impossible

The long-awaited 7,000 page strong report, commissioned by Wim Kok’s government in 1996, was compiled over 5 years.

It does summarize largely known facts, but states the Dutch force’s task at the time as "mission impossible", saying the contigent was not adequately trained, were poorly equipped and had no clear mandate.

"Humanitarian motivation and political ambitions drove the Netherlands to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission", the report says.

The report brought immediate calls for a parliamentary inquiry before which ministers would have to testify under oath.

Others have criticised the document as "whitewash".

The report also refers to the accusation that Dutch soldiers were indifferent to the fate of the Muslims, after a film showed Dutch soldiers drinking beer in Zagreb. "The nature and scale off the mass killings were not yet known, let alone fully realised, the partying was the spontaneous release of emotions after a very moving memorial service for dead colleagues".

Despite UN Secretary General Kofi Annan blaming the international community for its failure to protect the area, he also insisted it impossible "to say whether a more decisive action would have saved more lives".

The massacre is the darkest episode in Dutch history. Last August, a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague said the massacre was characterised by "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history".