Prominent Dutch minister says his government was responsible for Srebrenica genocide

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Fueling a widening debate, a senior cabinet minister says the Dutch government must accept responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims who were under the protection of Dutch troops in the U.N.-declared safe area of Srebrenica in 1995.

Environment Minister Jan Pronk said the government failed to give clear instructions to the commanders of the Dutch peacekeepers in the Muslim enclave in Bosnia, which was under siege by Serb forces.

The abandonment of the Muslims under their charge has raised accusations of cowardice and is widely considered a low point in Dutch military history.

Pronk said the failure was the government's, not the military's. "I won't say the soldiers failed. They operated on the basis of instructions given by us," he said in a television interview Thursday.

Pronk's remarks followed publication of a 128-page report by the respected Interchurch Peace Council, which blamed former Defense Minister Joris Voorhoeve for giving priority to the safety of the Dutch troops rather than to those they were supposed to defend in the besieged enclave.

An estimated 8,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the Srebrenica area in one week of July 1995. The peace council said the Dutch could have prevented the massacre, and called for an independent inquiry to hold Dutch politicians accountable for the fiasco.

In two weeks, the state-funded Netherlands Institute for War Documentation will publish the results of a five-year investigation by a team of more than a dozen historians who examined the Srebrenica affair. The exhaustive study will run 5,000 pages.

Pronk is a veteran member of the Labor Party of Prime Minister Wim Kok, and is known for his outspoken views. Last year, he nearly had to resign after he condemned the bombardment of Afghanistan (news - web sites), but he withdrew his criticism.

In the interview, Pronk said the Dutch commander in Bosnia should have been instructed to defend the Muslims who had fled to the U.N. compound for shelter from a Serb onslaught during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

Instead, the Dutch troops allowed Bosnian Serb General Radko Mladic to evacuate the Muslims, accepting his assurances they would be escorted to safety. Mladic segregated the men from their families, and most of the men were later massacred.

Kok, who also was prime minister at the time of Srebrenica, declined to comment on Pronk's remarks or on the peace council's report, saying he was awaiting the official report by the war documentation institute due on April 10.

The peace council said it based its findings on interviews and unpublished documents, including confidential minutes from ministerial meetings. Kok said he wanted to know how those minutes were leaked.

A 1999 report by the United Nations (news - web sites) largely absolved the Dutch battalion, saying the 150 soldiers were outnumbered and outgunned. It held the Bosnian Serbs primarily responsible, along with then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites), now on trial at a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague (news - web sites).

Death to all Moslem head hunters and those that protect them!!!

Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy

By: John Pomfret, Washington Post Foreign Service,The Washington Post, February 16, 1994

SREBRENICA, Bosnia: Nasir Oric's war trophies don't line the wall of his comfortable apartment-- one of the few with electricity in this besieged Muslim enclave stuck in theforbidding mountains of eastern Bosnia. They're on a videocassette tape: burned Serb houses and headless Serb men, their bodies crumpled in a pathetic heap.

"We had to use cold weapons that night," Oric explains as scenes of dead men sliced by knives roll over his 21-inch Sony. "This is the house of a Serb named Ratso," he offers as the camera cuts to a burned-out ruin. "He killed two of my men, so we torched it. Tough luck."

Reclining on an overstuffed couch, clothed head to toe in camouflage fatigues, a U.S. Army patch proudly displayed over his heart, Oric gives the impression of a lion in his den. For sure, the Muslim commander is the toughest guy in this town, which the U.N. Security Council has declared a protected "safe area."

Perhaps the time for toughness in Bosnia is nearing an end. The problem, though, is that hundreds of men like Oric who still want to fight dominate all three sides in this 22-month-old war. Nobody controls them; they have access to plenty of weapons and lead many young men. And, if anything, Balkan tradition is on their side.

As the United Nations seeks to make a cease-fire work in Sarajevo under the threat of NATO airstrikes, officials face the issue of how to neutralize men like Oric.

"I won't let these people destroy the peace," British army Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, told people in Sarajevo last weekend, referring to fighters who kept firing after the cease-fire began. "If we find out who they are, we will put their pictures on television and tell the world they are not serving your interests."

But Oric and others like him have other plans -- in Sarajevo and elsewhere. For him and his counterparts within Bosnian Serb and Croat paramilitary units, the war has been a godsend. While the vast majority of the 44,000 people crammed into this enclave about 50 miles east of Sarajevo have no fuel, Oric rents out his car -- a shiny black Volkswagen Golf. While most people spend their days and nights without electricity, Oric has power 24 hours a day. His generator runs on black-market diesel oil. It's only natural, because he's the biggest dealer in town.

These days Oric's men aren't fighting much -- although occasionally they sneak up behind the observation posts established by the Canadian U.N. troops on the borders of the "safe area" and take potshots at the 3,500 well-armed Serbs besieging Srebrenica.

His troops' main task is making a nine-hour trudge, across Serb lines, to the next U.N. "safe area" to the south: Zepa, where the Ukrainian U.N. troops are more amenable to deals than the 150-odd Canadian infantrymen here.

A formidably muscled 27-year-old with a patchy black beard, Oric, a native of Srebrenica, kicked around for several years after graduating from trade school, where he learned metalworking. In 1987, out of work in Belgrade, he joined the Serbian capital's police department and within several months was transferred to the republic's police force, participating in a crackdown on Muslim ethnic Albanians.

"I'm a man of action," he said in a recent interview. "I like adventure."

The highlight of Oric's career came when he served for two years as a personal bodyguard to Serbia's nationalist president, Slobodan Milosevic, the man credited in the West with igniting Yugoslavia's conflagration.

"I was a professional," Oric said. "It was a good, secure job."

Oric left the Serbian police early in 1992, when Serb nationalist fervor reached its peak. He was back in eastern Bosnia when the war broke out that April.

Last winter, a Serb attack on the Muslim villages of Cerska and Koljevic Polje pushed Oric and his men into Srebrenica. If not for the intercession of U.N. troops, Oric would either be dead, in a prisoner of war camp or living in the hills.

But Oric, who was wounded three times, sees it differently: "The U.N. saved the Serbs from our counterattack. We were ready to take it all back."

Part of Oric's appeal to this refugee-packed town is that he tells displaced Muslims what they want to hear. He will win them back their homes; he will avenge their dead mothers and fathers, raped sisters and cousins.

"As long as I am in Srebrenica," he said, "it will never be Serb. We will protect the hearths of our people. We will never be Palestinians."

See any of Bin Laden's boys while you served in Bosnia, TS? In Bosnia Osama Bin Laden and NATO were on the same side. Srebrinica did happen and God Bless the Serbs for doing it (though it was not the massacre made out to be)!!

From: Bin Laden's Balkan Connections

Osama bin Laden -- stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 -- is alleged to have retained the Bosnian passport he was issued in Vienna in 1993. According to a Sept. 1999 report in Dani, a Bosnian Muslim weekly paper, Alija Izetbegovic, then president of Bosnia, granted Mr. bin Laden a passport in recognition of his followers' contributions to Mr. Izetbegovic's quest to create a "fundamentalist Islamic republic" in the Balkans.

Dani also reported that al-Qaeda terrorist Mehrez Aodouni had been arrested in Istanbul while carrying a Bosnian passport. Like Mr. bin Laden, his citizenship had been granted "because he was a member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina army."

According to reports, it was the mujahedeen who committed some of the worst atrocities of the war, under Gen. Nasir Oric in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. Beheadings of Serbian civilians were commonplace, and in some villages the mujahedeen would dynamite homes with the inhabitants trapped inside.

No attempt was made to hide such atrocities. In fact, Gen. Oric would often address the media at the site of the massacres. On one such occasion, while standing in front of mujahedeen displaying decapitated human heads as trophies, Gen. Oric pointed to a smouldering building in ruins and proudly announced to reporters, "We blew those Serbs to the moon."

Alija Izetbegovic was also proud to display the fighting prowess of his mujahedeen volunteers. Following a successful attack against Serbian positions around Vozuce on Sept. 10, 1995, the Bosnian president held a televised medal presentation. Mujahedeen warriors had served as the vanguard of the assault force, and were awarded 11 decorations for valour, including the Golden Crescent, Bosnia's highest honour.

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