Relatives of three victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre last week filed a complaint with the Dutch prosecutor’s office charging three former United Nations peacekeepers with complicity in genocide, war crimes and murder.

By Sebastiaan Gottlieb

Commander Thom Karremans, Deputy Commander Rob Franken and personnel officer Berend Oosterveen were in charge of the Dutch peacekeeping battalion - known as Dutchbat - in the UN protected area of Srebrenica. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims flocked to the enclave to seek refuge from the bloody civil war raging in Bosnia. At first the people were held in the Potocari compound under UN protection but after Serbian forces overran the area, Dutchbat soldiers handed the refugees over to Serbian forces under the command of Ratko Mladic. In the course of three days, over 7,000 men and boys were slaughtered by the Serbs.

Rizo Mustafic, Ibro Nuhanovic and Muhamed Nuhanovic were among the men handed over to the Serbian forces. The remains of the Nuhanovics were found in a mass grave in 2007 but Mustafic’s body has never been recovered.

Mustafic’s daughter, Alma, is among the plaintiffs. Her father, who worked as an electrician for Dutchbat, had taken her and her mother to seek refuge in the UN compound. As an employee of the battalion, he was put on a list of people that the Dutch troops were allowed to evacuate. But at the last moment, he was forced to leave and was handed over to the Serbs.

“It all happened so fast,” recalls Ms. Mustafic. “He was simply pushed to one side and we were pushed to the other. We had no choice but to walk on. I kept looking behind me, trying to see him one last time. And my mother kept shouting: ‘Don’t look back! Don’t look back or else we’ll have to stay here too!”

In the complaint filed last Tuesday, Ms. Mustafic and relatives of the Nuhanovics charge that the Dutchbat commanders knew that the men would be killed after being deported from the compound.

“There can be little doubt about it,” says Liesbeth Zegveld, lawyer for the plaintiffs. “At the time, they expressed their fear for the fate of the men on several occasions. These Dutch soldiers feared a mass execution.” Therefore, the complaint reads, “these actions can be qualified as genocide and/or war crimes, and/or murder.”

But, says Ton Zwaan, associate professor at the Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies in Amsterdam, the complaint is ill founded. “If you know the genocide convention, intention is very important, taking an active part in the process – which is not the case here.”

Zegveld disagrees and says the men her clients want to see charged were actively involved in the deaths of the Srebrenica victims. “We decided to focus on those people who have personally, with their own hands, forced the people off the compound.

The staff of Dutchbat at the time who were therefore directly linked to their fate.” This is why they are seeking charges against the commanders at Potocari rather than top level Dutchbat officers who were based outside Srebrenica, she adds.

The concern, though, says Zwaan, is that the complaint risks trivialising the crime of genocide. “At this stage, all the attention should be focused on the people mainly responsible and these were the Bosnian Serbs led by Mladic and Karadzic. The way the word “genocide” is used these days makes the seriousness of the crime in the real cases more disputable and I regret that very much. And we know that politicians are always manipulating their words but I think juridical people should abstain from such practices.”

The commanders do have some responsibility, Zwaan agrees, but it falls far short of genocide. “The Dutch were partly incompetent because they did not recognize what was going to take place. In my mind, all the alarm bells should have been ringing the moment men and women were put apart from each other because we know from so many cases that that is a decisive step before mass murder, very often. But they didn’t know that, didn’t recognize the situation. And that is reproachable but it goes no way to charge them with genocide or complicity in genocide. I cannot see that in any legal sense or any historical sense or any moral sense.”

Published in the International Justice Tribune 110

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