The Bosnian government has been angered over yesterday's decision by the Dutch defence minister to award medals to soldiers whose withdrawal from the UN enclave of Srebrenica in 1995 led to the massacre of 8,000 Muslims.
The Bosnian president said the government had summoned the Dutch ambassador to lodge an official protest.
The killings were Europe's worst since World War Two, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague calls the massacre an act of genocide. It has charged 20 people in connection with the killings.
The Dutch government led by Wim Kok resigned in 2002 after a report on the massacre blamed politicians for sending the Dutch UN troops on an impossible mission.
"All of you receive today a special insignia as a visible acknowledgement . . . that in Srebrenica you had an extraordinarily difficult task," Dutch Defence Minister Henk Kamp told 500 members of the "Dutchbat" battalion at a medal-conferring ceremony in the northern city of Assen.
"And also to acknowledge the fact that Dutchbat has for years wrongly been held responsible for what happened in the enclave," he said.
During the 1992-95 Bosnian war, Srebrenica became a supposed safe area guarded by a Dutch army unit operating under a United Nations mandate.
But the lightly armed Dutch soldiers, lacking air support, were forced to abandon the enclave to Bosnian Serb forces, who took away and massacred some 8,000 Muslim men and boys relying on the protection of the Dutch troops.
Official inquiries cleared the Dutch troops of blame, however. A total of 850 Dutch soldiers served in the enclave.