Dutchbat commander Thom Karremans, and indeed his entire battalion knew what would happen to the men and boys who were ultimately slaughtered in the genocide perpetrated by Ratko Mladić's Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.

By *Tom Dannenbaum

So alleged a former surgeon, Ger Kremers, who was attached to Dutchbat (the Dutch battalion deployed to Srebrenica as part of a UN peacekeeping force in the 1990s), in a recent interview with the Dutch TV programme Profiel.

Dutch liability
The first judicial finding of Dutch liability for any of the deaths at Srebrenica came this summer, when The Hague Court of Appeal held the Netherlands liable for the deaths of two men and a youth. They were killed in the genocide after having been evicted from Dutchbat's compound at Potočari on 13 July 1995. 
But the judgement was narrow. The Court did not address claims that the battalion had a duty to intervene or otherwise act to prevent the killing, instead grounding liability for the three deaths in the finding that Dutchbat wrongfully evicted the victims from the compound. 239 of the approximately 8,000 killed at Srebrenica had been sheltered in the Potočari compound, though there is debate as to how many of them were evicted and how many left the compound voluntarily.

Hidden importance
Kremers' allegation contradicts the Dutchbat commander’s longstanding insistence that he did not know of the killings in advance. If found to be true, it has obvious legal significance for Karremans personally. The hidden importance of the claim, however, is in its implications for future litigation against the Netherlands.

Minor significance
The Court of Appeal did not determine whether Karremans and/or his deputy Rob Franken actually knew that they were sending the victims to their deaths in JUly's ruling. Instead, it held that, given what one or both of them knew about various earlier “alarming” incidents, they “reasonably could not have drawn any other conclusion" than that the able-bodied men transferred to the Bosnian Serb forces ran the real risk of being killed or subjected to inhuman treatment. This might lead one to think that whether Karremans actually knew what awaited the Potočari evictees is of minor significance.

Alarming incidents
However, the deceased subjects of this summer’s judgement were the very last persons sent from the compound. The Court's finding as to what conclusions it would have been reasonable for Karremans or Franken to draw depended on their awareness of a series of incidents leading up to the point of those final evictions. Claims regarding earlier evictions could run aground if the number of “alarming incidents” at the time of those evictions had not yet reached the tipping point past which it would have been unreasonable for the commanders to conclude anything other than that evictees were being sent to their deaths.

The trigger
This is where actual knowledge comes in. If it could be shown that Karremans or Franken knew what fate awaited those earlier evictees when transferring them to the Bosnian Serb forces, then, all else equal, this would render the evictions wrongful and thus trigger Dutch liability, even if the evidence on “alarming incidents” would not itself have shown alternative beliefs to be unreasonable.

Unusual
There is a caveat here. I say “all else equal” because there is another factor that made the subjects of this summer's ruling unusual. Being the last evictees meant that the burden on Dutchbat of keeping them would have been minimal. This allowed the Court to avoid considering the relevance of Dutchbat’s limited food and water, and to find that the risks of taking those few victims with the battalion were small enough to be outweighed by the great interest of saving their lives. Litigation regarding earlier evictions would have to demonstrate that these burdens would not have become excessive when applied to greater numbers of victims.

Excuse
Of course, it is much harder to imagine a court excusing the knowing eviction of civilians to genocidal deaths on the grounds that supplies were running out than it is to envision the Netherlands prevailing on the grounds that Dutchbat members were reasonably unaware of the threat facing those they were evicting. If Karremans knew, and this can be shown in court, the latter option would be eliminated. Therein lies the hidden significance of Kremers’ allegation.

* Tom Dannebaum is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University