Dutch blame U.N. for massacre

last updated 8 January 2015

Amsterdam

A French general commanding United Nations forces refused pleas for air support, allowing Serbian forces to massacre Muslims in 1995, the Dutch charged this week. The accusation came in a Dutch parliamentary report that removes the blame for the massacre from Dutch troops and assigns it to the U.N itself. During the Bosnian war, Dutch troops were deployed as U.N. peacekeepers to protect civilians in the U.N.-designated “safe area” of Srebrenica in Bosnia. But the troops did not intervene when Serbian forces rounded up the city’s 8,000 Muslim men and marched them off to be executed. Last spring, a parliamentary report faulted Dutch troops, and the entire Dutch Cabinet resigned in shame. The new report says Dutch troops had called for an air attack on the Serbs, but that French Gen. Bernard Janvier, the U.N. commander in Bosnia, ignored them.