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.
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