THE HAGUE: The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government has only “very limited liability” for the deaths of hundreds of Muslims in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 during the Bosnian War.
Judges slashed a lower court’s ruling on the compensation the Dutch state was liable to pay families of 350 Muslim men killed after lightly armed Dutch UN peacekeepers were overrun by Bosnian Serb forces.
“The Dutch State bears very limited liability in the ‘Mothers of Srebenica’ case,“ the court said. “That liability is limited to 10% of the damages suffered by the surviving relatives of approximately 350 victims.”
The lower court had said in 2017 that the Dutch actions meant the Muslims were “denied a 30% chance of avoiding abuse and execution”, and thus the Dutch state was liable for 30% of damages owed to families.
The relatives are represented by the Mothers of Srebrenica victims’ organisation which sued for compensation, sparking a years-long legal battle.
Almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the genocide — Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II — when the UN safe haven of Srebrenica was overrun.
Srebrenica has cast a long shadow over The Netherlands, forcing the government to resign in 2002 after a scathing report over the role of politicians in the failure of the peacekeepers.
The Dutch Supreme Court agreed that “the state did act wrongfully in relation to the evacuation of the 5,000 refugees” in the compound, including 350 Muslim men the Bosnian Serbs were unaware of.
It said the Dutch peacekeepers “failed to offer these 350 male refugees the choice to stay where they were, even though that would have been possible”. — AFP
