By Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- Amidst all the news out of Afghanistan and the Middle East this week, an all-but-forgotten crisis of current history raised its shameful head again--and it may shed some valuable light on more recent events.

The Dutch government resigned in response to a damning report about how Dutch peacekeepers stood by in 1995 in Srebrenica in Bosnia while Serb marauders took more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men away to be slaughtered.

The report, commissioned by the Dutch government and carried through by The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, was six years in the making and constituted all of 7,600 pages. It criticized not only the actions of the few Dutch peacekeepers on the ground, working under a highly limited UN mandate, but also attempts of Dutch commanders afterward to cover up their shame.

There is no question that the relative handful of lightly armed Dutch did aid the rapacious Serbs, intent upon wiping out most of the male Bosnian population, during those awful days of autumn. The Dutch experience then became the awful example of the West's abysmal half-intervention in the Balkans.

The government of Prime Minister Wim Kok saw this. In their resignation, the members almost all put their concerns in moral terms, for the report had indeed concluded that Dutch politicians must share the blame for Srebenica with the military. Bosnians tapped gratefully but angrily into the new moral mood as well, with the Bosnian foreign ministry issuing a statement describing the mass resignation as an "act of morality," but perhaps also as a necessary preamble to a wider examination of the international community's guilt.

It is here that the deeper questions begin. Yes, one must applaud the dutiful Dutch, with their active Protestant consciences, for being the first to step forward, to take responsibility for what was not done in the Balkans wars. But is this really fair?

The poor Dutch peacekeepers, after all, were sent there underarmed, with no intelligence about the Serbs who were closing in on them, and, above all, with no mandate whatsoever from a passive, corrupt, ever "neutralist" United Nations to do anything but stand by. If you can seriously imagine this, they had been ordered "to deter by presence." Simply "being there" would make the Serbs, who were on a bloody rampage, halt, terrified, in their tracks.

The Dutch, of course, could have disobeyed orders and fought off the Serbs and probably been themselves killed. But soldiers are not, as a matter of their commitment to uniform and country, supposed to commit suicide for their flag.

When it comes to morality, the Dutch peacekeepers were the least guilty of anyone.

The United Nations, which oversaw one humiliating disaster after another from Bosnia to Rwanda to Sierra Leone, has admitted in several internal reports that the organization unwittingly "aided and abetted evil" through its foolish use of the forces entrusted to it.

But has anyone paid a price for the tens of thousands of dead across the world during the wanton '90s at the hands of UN "neutralism"? Hardly!

After four years of bitter warfare in the Balkans between 1991 and 1995, the world finally opted for the Dayton accords. But even so, the Serbs have never been punished for their crimes--and essentially do not admit them to this day.

The UN leadership in the Balkans highhandedly refused the Dutch peacekeepers' pleas for (at least) air strikes against the Serbs because that would involve the United Nations in the fight. Have they even said they're sorry, much less been punished? Case rested.

And today, are we not facing similar moral challenges in the Middle East, where every Israeli strike to wipe out a Palestinian camp or village is done in America's name, because every bulldozer, F-16 and chopper has "Made in America" on it?

When will the moralizing come on these new horrors? When will Americans have to step forward, with still another of these grisly, too-late reports in hand, and say, "Why didn't we say something then? Why didn't we do something then?"

The Bosnians--and surely many others--hope that this Dutch report will lead to a larger examination of guilt on the part of the international community for what it did-- and more, for what it didn't do--in those dark days of the last decade. We listen still in vain, as we see the new acts of horrific violence playing out before our eyes.

-- Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C

From Chicago Tribune

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Terbitan : 24 April 2002

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