Court confirms Dutch UN peacekeepers partly liable for Srebrenica massacre

Dutch soldiers acting as UN peacekeepers were partly liable for the deaths of about 300 Muslim men massacred near Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 during the Yugoslavian civil war, an appeals court in The Hague has ruled.

The ruling upholds a 2014 decision that the Dutch forces should have known that the men seeking refuge at their base would be murdered by Bosnian Serb troops if they were turned away – as they were.

Many of the victims had fled to Srebrenica’s UN-designated safe zone only to find themselves outnumbered and the lightly-armed Dutch troops unable to defend them. It was then that they headed to the nearby Dutch base, only to be subsequently handed over to their murderers.

Presiding judge Gepke Dulek-Schermers said that Dutch soldiers “knew or should have known that the men were not only being screened … but were in real danger of being subjected to torture or execution … by having the men leave the compound unreservedly, they were deprived of a chance of survival”.

The judge added that the soldiers had facilitated the separation of the men and the boys among the refugees.

In a departure from an earlier ruling, the court said the Netherlands should pay only 30 per cent of damages to victims’ families, after estimating odds of 70 per cent that the victims would have been dragged from the base and killed regardless of what action Dutch soldiers took.The amount of damages will be determined in a separate hearing unless the victims and the state can reach a settlement.

The court rejected a claim from the relatives of other Srebrenica victims, who argued that Dutch government should also be held responsible for the protection of thousands more Muslims who had gathered outside the military base.

Judges have acquitted Netherlands of responsibility for more than 7,000 other victims killed in the Srebrenica area.

The ruling came as a lawyer for 200 Dutch army veterans said his clients planned to sue the state for compensation for the trauma they suffered after being sent on “an impossible mission” in Srebrenica.

The Dutch government resigned in 2002 after acknowledging its failure to protect the refugees, but it said then that the peacekeepers had been on 'mission impossible'. The Netherlands maintains that the Bosnian Serbs, not Dutch troops, bear responsibility for the killings.

About 8,000 Muslim men and boys in total were killed by Bosnian Serb troops in Srebrenica in July 1995, in what is believed to be the worst mass killing on European soil since the second world war.