The Dutch Defence Ministry has decided to provide a one-off payment of 5,000 euros to Dutch veterans who were stationed in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica during the 1995 genocide.
The ministry said that every Dutchbat III veteran will receive the symbolic payment as a “recognition of the exceptional circumstances under which the military had to operate 25 years ago” as well as for the “criticism and negative media attention” they have been exposed to “unjustly” throughout the years.
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The initiative came from a report of a special committee that studied the condition of veterans from the battalion who failed to guard the Srebrenica safe zone in 1995, which said that “soldiers still have problems and consequences” due to that mission.
The ministry also said it would organize trips to Srebrenica for members of the battalion as of 2022.
According to a report, “such travel can contribute to the processing of the past by dealing with the situation at the site where the event took place and by meeting other veterans and locals.”
The Dutch ministry accepted all other recommendations of the report published on December 14 last year, which claims that the Dutch battalion “cannot be held responsible for the genocide that took place outside the enclave”, and that there are a number of investigations that say the Dutch battalion cannot be blamed for the fall of Srebrenica.
The Dutch Supreme Court ruled in the summer of 2019 that the country was partly to blame for the deaths of about 350 locals in Srebrenica whom the Dutch Battalion handed over to the army of Republika Srpska on July 13, 1995.
More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in the UN-protected Srebrenica enclave in the days following July 11, 1995.
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