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Srebrenica victims win lawsuit against The Netherlands government

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Geneva, July 5, IRNA -- The appeals court in The Netherlands on Tuesday held the Dutch government responsible for the deaths of three Bosnian Muslim men slain by Serbs during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

The victims were among thousands of Muslims who took shelter in the U.N. compound as Bosnian Serb forces commanded by Gen. Ratko Mladic overran Srebrenica on July 11 in what was to become the bloody climax to the 1992-95 Bosnian war that claimed 100,000 lives.

Two days later, the outnumbered Dutch peacekeepers bowed to pressure from Mladic's troops and forced thousands of Muslim families out of the compound.

Bosnian Serb forces sorted the Muslims by gender, then trucked the males away and began executing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys. Those bodies were plowed into hastily made mass graves in what international courts have ruled was genocide.

The ruling said even though the Dutch soldiers were operating under a U.N mandate, they were under the 'effective control' of top Dutch military and government officials in The Hague when they ordered hundreds of Muslim men and boys out of their compound.

The ruling said the three men were among the last to be expelled and by that time the 'Dutchbat' peacekeepers already had seen Bosnian Serb troops abusing Muslim men and boys and should have known they faced the real threat of being killed.

'Dutchbat should not have turned these men over to the Serbs,' a summary of the judgment said.

The Dutchbat had been witness to multiple incidents in which the Bosnian Serbs mistreated or killed male refugees outside the compound. The Dutch therefore knew that... the men were at great risk if they were to leave the compound,' the court said in its ruling.

Mr. Mustafic was forced to leave and was separated from his wife just outside the compound fence and taken away, and was never heard of again.

Hasan Nuhanovic was allowed to stay, but his relatives were forced to leave. The remains of his father and brother were recovered in 2007 and 2010.

The case was brought by relatives of Rizo Mustafic, who worked as an electrician for Dutchbat, and by Dutchbat interpreter Hasan Nuhanovic, who lost his father and brother in the fall of the Bosnian Muslim enclave.

They filed a lawsuit against the Dutch state because Dutchbat handed over their relatives to the Bosnian Serbs, and have been trying to get the Dutch government to take responsibility for their deaths for nine years.

IRNA reporter in Geneva said that Tuesday's ruling is the latest step in dealing with a national trauma for the Netherlands.

The humiliated Dutch troops returned home from Srebrenica to scathing charges of cowardice and incompetence, although subsequent inquiries exonerated the ground forces.

The Dutch government resigned in 2002 after an investigation by the National War Documentation Institute blamed the debacle on Dutch authorities and the United Nations for sending the battalion into the mission, failing to give the peacekeepers enough weapons for self-defense and refusing to answer the commanders' call for air support.