Dutch military mission in Bosnia ends in Srebrenica's shadow

(THE HAGUE) - The last Dutch peacekeepers in Bosnia will leave next month after a two-decade mission overshadowed by the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

"We are ending the mission at the end of October when the largest part of our troops return home, except for about five officers committed to non-executive duties," Defence Ministry spokesman Jos van der Leij told AFP.

"The scaling down of our commitment in Bosnia comes with increased stability in the area and a shift in our own priorities where we are needed around the world," he said.

The last 60 Dutch troops to leave at the end of October are part of the EU-run EUFOR operation in Bosnia comprising 1,500 troops from 21 countries.

Since the early 1990s, the Netherlands has been involved in various UN, NATO and EU missions to the conflict-torn former Yugoslavia, where at the height of its operations, some 2,000 Dutch troops served as peacekeepers.

But it is the televised images of Srebrenica's Dutch force commander Thom Karremans being humiliated by a belligerent Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic -- and its aftermath that lies etched within the mission's history.

Karremans' contingent of some 450 Dutch blue helmets, charged with protecting civilians in the "safe" enclave were shamefully overrun by Serb forces under Mladic in July 1995.

Thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys were then captured or surrendered in the Bosnian town before almost 8,000 were executed in the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

Mladic's arrest in May this year to face genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity charges before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has reignited debate on the conduct of Dutch troops at the enclave.

Many, including the Mothers of Srebrenica association, which in July won a Dutch appeals court ruling holding the state responsible for the deaths of three Muslim translators, believe more could have been done to prevent the massacre.

"For the international community the drama at Srebrenica stands out and of course it's a black page for us as well," the Defence Ministry's Van der Leij said.

"But I want to stress that today there is relative stability in Bosnia after years of conflict and all that happened there. In that sense, yes, our mission was a success," he said.

The period of the UN's mission "ended badly for the Netherlands" with the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, agreed Kees Homan, a defence analyst at the Hague-based Clingendael Institute. "It's a situation that's been written in the annals of the Netherlands," he told AFP.

But after NATO took over in 1995 and the European Union in 2004, stability returned to the country, Homan said.

"With the withdrawal of the Dutch military presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a book is being closed, but not forgotten," said Dutch director of defence staff, major-general Tom Middendorp this week.

Middendorp was handing out medals Tuesday to the last 60 soldiers.

"This parade was the symbolic closure of our mission in Bosnia," he said.

In the last 20 years, 40,000 Dutch soldiers took tours of duty to the Balkans. Sixteen were killed, Van der Leij said.