Srebrenica - an apology?

The Dutch government have apologised to former members of the Dutch battalion of the UN safekeeping force that was supposed to protect the enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia during the war there in the mid-1990s.

This is a very difficult subject in the Netherlands. At the time, I was working for the Ministry of Defence there, and I have known some of the members of Dutchbat personally. Some of them were eye-balling Mladic and could have pulled a gun on him. But the aura of power is irresistible and to be fair, in the face of overwhelming firepower, resistance is sometimes futile.

Dutchbat were poorly equipped by the UN to carry out the task that they were ordered to perform. Mark Rutte's apology is one by proxy; it should have been the UN apologising. That would have carried more clout. None of it, though, will bring back the 8,000 men and boys from Srebrenica who were murdered back in 1995. The UN failed them. The verdict by the Dutch Supreme Court that the Netherlands were partly responsible is an accurate reflection of shared guilt.

Karadzic

Radovan Karadzic (remember him?), erstwhile leader of the Bosnian Serbs, has been sentenced to life in prison on appeal to his previous conviction for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. The sentence is an increase from the 40 years handed down at the original trial. Karadzic is now 73, so will spend the rest of his life behind bars. It's a pity that (thus far) only RT.com is the sole English-language news provider to carry that news. I'm not relaying their link, due to bias in their reporting. Referring to the Srebrenica massacre in quotation marks amounts to bias in my book.
Only NOS.nl has an unbiased report, but that channel reports in Dutch.

One of the worst war crimes that Karadzic was involved in was the massacre of 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. A supposed safe UN-enclave in Bosnian Serb territory, the male Moslim population was taken away, under the noses of and without resistance from (and with coerced assistance by) the Dutch UN forces. The Dutch were blamed for this. Maybe so. But it was the UN who were at fault for providing peashooters against tanks; and the Bosnian Serbs and their military commander Ratko Mladic who organised and perpetrated the killings.