Islam Times - "The Dutch State bears very limited liability in the 'Mothers of Srebenica' case," the Supreme Court said Friday. Earlier this month, Bosnian Muslims visited the graves of their relatives at the memorial cemetery of the Srebrenica 1995 massacre in Potocari, near Srebrenica.
The Netherlands' Supreme Court has affirmed that the country's troops are partly to blame for the deaths of 350 Muslim men and boys after the fall of the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. But in a break with an earlier ruling, the court lowered the Dutch liability for the massacre to 10%, from 30%.
"The Dutch State bears very limited liability in the 'Mothers of Srebenica' case,"
the Supreme Court said as it announced the ruling.
The Mothers of Srebenica is an umbrella group formed by families and loved ones who say Dutch U.N. peacekeeping troops didn't do everything they could to prevent the Muslim men and boys from being slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs led by Ratko Mladic, the "butcher of Bosnia" who was
convicted of genocide and war crimes in 2017.
A U.N. war crimes tribunal found Mladic guilty of "masterminding the killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Europe's worst massacre since World War II," NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.
The case centers on the deadly days after Srebrenica fell on July 11, 1995, when Bosnian Serb troops entered the city and some 25,000 refugees sought refuge with a Dutch battalion called Dutchbat III, in what was deemed a "minimum safe area" away from hostilities.
t the time, both the U.N. and the Netherlands agreed that the refugees and peacekeepers must be evacuated. But the families say the Dutch force failed in two key respects: by cooperating with Mladic's force to allow refugees to be taken to buses through a narrow sluice that made it easy to separate males from the crowd and, toward the end of the evacuation, by not offering 350 men and boys a chance to stay in the Dutch compound.
In an earlier ruling, the Hague Court of Appeal had largely agreed with the families on those points, saying that the "group of refugees was denied a 30 percent chance of avoiding abuse and execution," as the Supreme Court said.