This verdict surprised the litigants, and the Dutch State. However, in English criminal law, if a person has a responsibility to care for and protect a person in their charge, and they come to harm through neglect, they may in certain circumstances be criminally liable.
The troops stood by. The massacre took place. The magnitude of that default can’t be over-emphasised.
But there is more.
The Guardian reports
Relatives of the victims of Europe‘s biggest massacre in decades won a landmark case, immense satisfaction, and the likelihood of substantial damages when a Dutch appeals court ruled for the first time that theNetherlands had to answer for the deaths of Muslim men at Srebrenica 16 years ago.
The verdict stunned the Dutch government as well as the plaintiffs, who have campaigned on the issue for more than a decade and had almost given up.
If the ruling is upheld by the supreme court, there could be hundreds of claims for damages from relatives from some of the estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males butchered by the Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladic, on trial at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of genocide.
The verdict also found for the first time that countries contributing to a UN peacekeeping mandate must answer for their actions and cannot enjoy immunity behind a UN cloak. The court rejected the Dutch government’s argument that it was not responsible for its troops stationed in Srebrenica as they were under UN authority.
…
A Dutch court rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments in 2008, ruling that the Netherlands could not be held responsible as the Dutch troops were under UN authority. A parallel case ruled that the UN was immune to prosecution.
The appeal court verdict stunned the Dutch government and even blindsided the litigants.
“This comes as a surprise. We will have to study the ruling and then decide on our next steps,” said a Dutch defence ministry spokesman.
…
Some 5,000 people including 239 adult males had crowded into the Dutch Potocari compound seeking shelter from the Serbs.
Nuhanovic was allowed to stay on the base when the Dutch commanders ordered most to leave. He pleaded with Colonel Robert Franken to let his father, mother and younger brother stay. The outcome was a heartrending Sophie’s Choice moment.
Nuhanovic’s father had been a member of a trio of Srebrenica Muslims negotiating with Mladic days earlier. Because of that, at the last minute as the buses were leaving, Franken told the father he could stay. “Can my younger son also stay?” the father asked. “No,” he was told.
The father went with his wife and son. None of them were seen alive again.
Nuhanovic is also considering pressing criminal charges against Franken and his superior officer in Srebrenica at the time, Tom Karremans.
The judges yesterday dismissed the argument that the UN alone was responsible and that the Dutch authorities had no liability.
“The Dutch state is responsible for the death of these men because [UN peacekeepers] Dutchbat should not have handed them over,” the judges found.
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While lawyers do not expect the families of the thousands of victims to claim compensation from the Dutch, there may be demands from the families of the 239 men expelled from the compound to their deaths.
“It won’t be about American-style sums of money,” said Zegveld. “This has always been about accountability rather than compensation.””
Just terrible
Tokyo Nambu in the comments adds:
That the Dutch army surrendered is hardly surprising: since they barely fired a shot to defend their own country when it was being invaded, and the Dutch Jewish population was one of the worst affected by the holocaust because of the almost universal collaboration by the Dutch police and civil service, the idea that the Dutch would get involved in a shooting war to defend foreigners is fantastical. It’s a joke army, which at the time largely consisted of untrained conscripts to keep unemployment down.
But given the Dutch Army is useless, the tragic part was the hubris showed by their political desire to show that they could play on a big stage by joining a UN peacekeeping force. There were problems with rules of engagement, but they were badly equipped, badly led and badly trained. No-one forced the Dutch to sign up for a man’s job, but they thought their boys could look like men by pretending to be grown ups. The individual Dutch troops behaved badly, but they were in an impossible position — they only had individual and squad-level weapons, for example.
However, British and Israeli troops have held off battalion level opposition with personal weapons; the quality of training, discipline, morale and esprit de corps has allowed professional armies to defend positions against massive irregular forces. Not one Dutch solider was injured in the massacre: they surrendered to the genocide without firing a shot.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Dutch Army was lead by cowards.
