Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide ed. by Lara J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner (review)

In April and May 1993 a number of United Nations resolutions established what became known as "safe areas" in the Bosnian cities of Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Žepa, Goražde, and Bihać. In these safe areas both local and refugee Bosniaks could live in relative security, protected by troops from the UN force known as UNPROFOR. Nevertheless, Serb forces often shelled the safe areas and frequently threatened and sometimes attacked the UN peacekeepers. Occasionally, Serb militias took the latter hostage in order to coerce the UN to accede to their demands.

The most egregious breach of the safe areas began on July 11, 1995, when Serb forces attacked Srebrenica. A small city in eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica had been declared a safe area on April 16. The city soon became the scene of the greatest massacre on European soil since the Holocaust. As a city under siege, Srebrenica suffered constant privation as Serb forces blocked UN aid convoys. In holding out, Srebrenica had become a symbol of Bosniak resistance, but in early July 1995 its defiance came to an end. Encouraged by UN equivocation over whether to maintain the safe areas initiative, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić led a ten-day operation to take over Srebrenica and subject it to "ethnic cleansing."

As the campaign was getting underway, thousands of Srebrenica's men and boys fled, attempting to reach Bosniak forces beyond the hills. Most of the women, children, and elderly were evacuated on Serb-chartered buses. Upon taking the city and overrunning the UNPROFOR base at nearby Potočari, Mladić's forces began hunting down the men and boys. After capturing them in small groups, the Serbs concentrated them in fields, sports grounds, schools, and factories, where they were slaughtered in the thousands. It is impossible to ascertain the number killed, because many mass graves are yet to be located and because population figures from before the city's fall failed to include the large numbers of refugees who earlier had flooded the city. Estimates have hovered around eight thousand killed, though tens of thousands remain unaccounted for.

Srebrenica became a symbol of the war's brutality and of UN failure. The Dutch peace-keepers and their NATO commanders did not defend the city, but simply surrendered it to Serb forces. Earlier, in late January 1994 the first units of a 1,170-strong Dutch paratroop battalion ("Dutchbat") had been deployed to Bosnia, and, on March 3 of that year, some 570 of their number entered Srebrenica to relieve a much smaller Canadian detachment. In the sixteen months that followed, Dutchbat experienced a range of challenging situations, including casualties and the Serb use of captured Dutchbat prisoners as human shields. During their subsequent takeover of the city in July 1995 the Serbs—in full view of the Dutch peacekeepers—separated the men and boys from their wives, mothers, and sisters. Some accused the officers of Dutchbat of participating in the process, even to the extent of assisting people onto the buses that would take them out of the city and thereby ethnically cleanse Srebrenica.

News of the capitulation caused a great deal of national soul-searching in the Netherlands. Dutch citizens were dismayed, for instance when it became known that on the night before the final Serb assault on the city Dutchbat commander Lieutenant-Colonel Thom Karremans had drunk a toast with General Mladić—in honor, it was said, of Mladić's victory. (Karremans later explained that it had been only a glass of water, but by then—courtesy of the Serb photographers who captured the exchange—the damage had been done.) The fall of Srebrenica, and the murder of thousands, was seen as a matter of national shame in the Netherlands. In 1996, the Dutch government of Prime Minister Wim Kok commissioned an official inquiry by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, which issued its report...