In Europe

café, a few rowdy men are drinking slivovitz. I end up next to the owner of the battery factory. His father was buried recently, the plant is bankrupt, none of the machines are working. His words roll out slowly, drunkenly. ‘Holland, ah, Holland, yes. They weren't bad, those Dutch. But so young. Just girls. Supposed to protect us. Made no difference. Waved goodbye to them. Thank you, all of you. So young …’
    Meanwhile, enough books have been written about the Srebrenica debacle to fill three bookshelves. About the taking hostage of the almost 400 UN soldiers, even before the attack, including the 70 or so Dutchbatters who were very publicly shackled to bridges and other objects; a Serb media show that actually did not last much longer than the time the TV producers needed, but which had far-reaching consequences. About the extreme caution exercised by the UN after that, so as not to endanger these men any further. About the ensuing lack of air support, even after Srebrenica had been rolled over and Dutchbat found itself in an extremely precarious position. About the so-called ‘blocking positions’ that the Dutch soldiers had to assume on orders from the Hague, a thin cordon of 50 soldiers and 6 lightly armed armoured vehicles against 1,500 Serbinfantrymen backed by tanks. About the inept Dutchbat commander Ton Karremans, who embarrassedly raised a glass with Ratko Mladić for Serbian television and, ten days later, still referred to the Serb general as ‘a professional who knows his stuff’. About the party the Dutch Army top brass threw afterwards for the Dutchbatters.
    When it was all over, the Dutch were accused of laziness and a lack of courage. French president Jacques Chirac felt that ‘
l'honneur de la nation
’ of the Netherlands had been besmirched, and UN commander Bernard Janvier later told a French parliamentary investigative committee that things probably would have gone quite differently had French soldiers, rather than Dutch, been stationed at Srebrenica: ‘In all honesty I can say that French soldiers would have fought, with all the risks that might have brought with it.’
    But Janvier knew, better than anyone else, that his Dutch blue helmets had been in a hopeless position right from the start. That, after all, was precisely why there were no French troops in Srebrenica: no other country was willing to burn its fingers on the problem. Only the Dutch government was naïve enough for that.
    Before me lie the Dutch newspapers of Monday, 24 July, 1995. ‘A toast to freedom,’ says the headline of the
Telegraaf
, above a photograph of twelve cheerful Dutch soldiers in Novi Sad, enjoying a post-hostageship meal with the compliments of the Serb government. Most of the other Dutchbatters were welcomed back to Zagreb by Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Wim Kok. In its commentary, the paper writes: ‘Their dedication shows once again how well equipped for its tasks the Dutch military is, when it comes right down to it.’ ‘For Dutchbatter, Serbs are now “the good guys”’, reports
NRC Handelsblad
. Commander Karremans speaks of an ‘excellently planned offensive’ by the Serbs, who had ‘outmanoeuvred’ the Dutch battalion in ‘spectacular’ fashion.
    In late 1995 – the courageous Catalan war correspondent Miguel Gil Moreno had meanwhile filmed dozens of corpses and mass graves, and Dužsko Tubić had already travelled with David Rhode of the
Christian Science Monitor
into the killing fields – Ton Karremans was promoted to the rank of colonel. A roll of film shot by a Dutch soldier, with photographs ofthe events in Srebrenica, had – uniquely in the history of military photography – been destroyed while it was being developed.
    Anyone studying the role of the Netherlands in the Srebrenica affair cannot help but be struck by its unworldliness. Not only during the final events, but even from the start, when parliament and cabinet – with the overweening pride of an all-knowing Western country – light-heartedly plunged the nation into this Eastern European debacle. The Netherlands is not accustomed to power politics, and also has a long non-militarist tradition. No one seems to have thought beforehand about the possibility of some very ferocious fighting around Srebrenica, no one seems to have anticipated that the whole thing could end up in a spree of rape and murder. Here too one finds traces of the compromising spirit of the polder: Dutch blue helmets