Dutch Government Resigns After Critical Report on Srebrencia

On April 17, 2002, the Dutch Government resigned in response to a stinging report on the killing of 7,000 Bosnian Muslims taken by Bosnian Serbs from the U.N.-designated “safe area” of Srebrenica and shot while they were under the protection of Dutch troops. The resignation and report has some important lessons for peacekeeping. The Netherlands Institute for War Document (NIOD), the author of the 7,600-page report, concluded that the Dutchbat (the acronym for the Dutch peace keeping contingent) had an impossible mission: it was to keep peace where there was no peace. It was driven by humanitarian motivation and political ambitions to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission. The report discusses how the mass slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica was “horrifying and probably the most violent excess to take place in the process of disintegrations of Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990’s.