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Dutch Government Resigns Over
Srebrenica Massacre
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Wim Kok
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THE HAGUE, April 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Dutch government resigned Tuesday after a report on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia blamed leaders in The Hague for sending Dutch UN peacekeepers on a "mission impossible" to protect the enclave.
"I will go to the Queen and offer the resignation of all my ministers and ministers of state. After that, I will return to parliament to explain the decision," Prime Minister Wim Kok said, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The five-year inquiry into the massacre pointed the finger at the Dutch government and military leaders as well as the United Nations for setting up a mission that was doomed to fail.
In July 1995, more than 7,500 Muslim men and boys from the eastern Bosnian enclave were killed by Bosnian Serb forces who seized the town, protected by Dutch peacekeepers, two years after the UN declared it a "safe haven."
Unease over the Dutch role in the massacre, considered the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II, permeated politics in The Hague for the last decade.
The government-commissioned report on the fall of Srebrenica, published last Wednesday, concluded that "humanitarian motivation and political ambitions drove The Netherlands to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission," AFP reported.
Following the release of the report, two ministers publicly said they were considering stepping down, a move that sparked the government crisis.
After holding a crisis meeting for several hours with all ministers, Labour Prime Minister Kok announced the resignation of his centre-left cabinet.
While the resignation of the full cabinet sent a powerful political message, it was not expected to severely disrupt Dutch political life as elections are planned for May 15.
Kok already said last year that he would not run again.
In a separately related development, the UN Tuesday unveiled a 12.5 million dollar (14 million euro) recovery program for Bosnia's Srebrenica.
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Muslim
women survived the terrible massacre.
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The three-year program presented by the UN Development Program (UNDP) will help develop the local economy, governance projects, housing and infrastructure and give support to civil society and social welfare, Moises Venacio, a spokesman for UNDP said.
Venacio said the aim of the project was to "leave behind an international legacy of hope...and not one of destruction and desolation."
For its own part the UN accepted partial responsibility for the mass killing in a report published more than two years ago.
Srebrenica remained largely cut off from international aid until 1999, it having remained under the Serb part of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, under the Dayton peace accord which ended the 1992-95 Bosnia war.
Although Muslims dominated the region before the war, Muslim survivors of the massacre, mainly women, fled the area and Bosnian Serbs occupied the remaining housing there.
The aid started to trickle back after 2000 elections resulted in a Muslim majority in Srebrenica's municipal assembly and a Muslim mayor, and a pick-up in returns by the Muslim population.
An international donors' conference for the UNDP project will be held in New York on May 13 under the aegis of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan.
Contributions from Bosnia's two post-war entities - the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat federation - are still being discussed and will be announced in New York, Venacio said.
Venacio stressed the project was "not about charity, reconstruction or hand-outs."
"It is about an integrated support framework to all those courageous people, many of them women, that are rebuilding their shattered lives," he said.
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