Bosnian Serbs sue UN, Dutch for Srebrenica killings

Banja Luka — A Bosnian Serb group Tuesday said it had filed a suit in a Dutch court against the UN and the Netherlands for failing to protect Srebrenica Serbs during the 1992-1995 war.

"Our lawyers filed the suit … last week because they failed to protect Serb civilians in Srebrenica," the head of the Historic Project Srebrenica association, Stefan Karganovic, told AFP.

According to his group, which is based in The Hague, some 1,000 Serb civilians in Srebrenica, then under the protection of Dutch United Nations peacekeepers, were killed or went missing during the war.

Srebrenica was a UN-protected Muslim enclave until July 11, 1995, when it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces who then executed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The suit was filed at the same district court in The Hague where Bosnian Muslims who lost family members in the massacre are seeking justice for the alleged failure of Dutch troops to protect their loved ones.

Karganovic said the goal of his association was "moral" adding it wanted to prove that the "Srebrenica tragedy was multinational and that the Serbs have been killed there too."

The association did not want to deny the massacre of Muslims, he stressed.

"It was a horrible massacre, but we want to point out that Serbs were also exposed to sufferings there."

The Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, has been termed genocide by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), both based in The Hague.

In 2002, the Dutch government resigned over an official report that stated its peacekeepers had been sent on an "impossible" mission.

The UN has also admitted it failed to protect the Muslims of Srebrenica from mass murder, but none of its officials were held responsible.

AFP/Expatica