WHEN RATKO Mladic arrives in The Hague en route to Scheveningen high-security jail next week, it will be a moment of quiet satisfaction for prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – and a moment of long-awaited national catharsis for the Dutch people.
Because while the former Bosnian Serb general may in the end be found guilty of ordering the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, it was the Dutch government which was pilloried and forced to resign in 2002 for failing to stop the infamous killings.
Yesterday – 16 years on – with Mladic finally in custody in Belgrade, Dutch newspapers were still hotly debating the question of whether the 110 lightly armed Dutch UN peacekeepers left standing between Mladic’s Bosnian Serb army and the Muslim refugees corralled in the so-called “safe haven” could ever have prevented such an atrocity.
The fact is that they did not. A report published in April 2002 condemned the Dutch government for sending the peacekeepers on a “mission impossible” to protect Srebrenica – and said the UN shared the government’s responsibility for failing to prevent the slaughter.
However, the fact that the report – by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation – stopped short of blaming the peacekeepers themselves provoked angry protests from the relatives of the victims and demands for a public inquiry.
That anger has never abated. Last July, relatives of some of the Srebrenica victims started legal proceedings against three named Dutch military officers, claiming they had failed to protect the enclave despite allegedly being aware of previous mass executions.
The fallout from the institute’s report also changed the political landscape of the Netherlands.
It brought an end to the successful political career of prime minister Wim Kok, who was deeply affected by the massacre, and declared before resigning: “The international community has no face and cannot bear responsibility. I can and I will.”
Kok, who was arguably Holland’s most popular postwar prime minister, did not contest the subsequent general election in May 2002, in which his Labour Party suffered a landslide defeat and the electorate swung decisively to the right.
Given the degree to which Dutch involvement in the events surrounding Srebrenica has haunted the Netherlands, it is not surprising the government here was to the forefront in insisting Serbia should not join the EU until Mladic was arrested and extradited to The Hague.
Even yesterday, as the chief prosecutor at the international tribunal, Serge Brammertz, was welcoming Mladic’s arrest as an indication that “the commitment to international criminal justice is entrenched”, prime minister Mark Rutte was still maintaining a tough line on Serbian accession to the EU. He insisted the arrest did not amount to a recipe for automatic accession.
“We will have to look at all the facts surrounding the application for accession”, he told reporters, in what many took as a thinly veiled reference to Holland’s frustration that Mladic had apparently been allowed to live freely in Serbia for so many years.
He added: “In the end, people get chased, prosecuted and put away. In that sense, this is a special moment for many people.”