Here is a measure of how shameless some nations have become:

The Dutch government plans to give a citation to troops who served as peacekeepers in Srebrenica but failed to stop the massacre of Bosnian Muslims 11 years ago in what was supposed to be a UN-protected safe haven. The plan to award a unique insignia for duty at Srebrenica outraged survivors and victims' families Wednesday, who called it an insult to those who died.

The award was meant to heal a painful wound in the military, which felt unfairly blamed for the massacre and its reputation unjustly tarnished.

Even in the face of massive failures, all of which were corroborated by a parliamentary inquest that sparked the resignation of a government, there are those who find ways for some macabre self-congratulation. If you want to get a flavor of the Dutchbats accomplishments in Srebrenica take a look at this sobering article by Guido Snel. Key excerpts:

The Dutch, in fact, felt as endangered as the local population, which in the given circumstances, to put it mildly, made no sense. Rules, instructions and poor communication would later supply the desired justification.

[ ... ]

‘My case is one of the most terrible in terms of the international community’s role. The Dutch major Robert Franken told me to explain to my father that he can remain on the base. My father asks what will happen to his younger son and my mother. Franken tells me: "Hasan, tell your father that if he does not want to stay, he can go too. And there’ll be no further discussion." My father had three seconds to decide whether he wants to stay on the base, to go on living with his elder son, or go and die with his younger son and his wife. He chose to leave. A month ago, at the court in The Hague, Major Franken coolly states that he gave him a choice. What sort of choice?’

"People laugh that we can't find bin Laden in some remote part of the Pakistan border, but European NATO cannot find the two most wanted war criminals right on its own soil" - Christopher Hitchens, talking to Hugh Hewitt.

The death of Slobodan Milosevic is having some sort of prolonged analytical impact with many commentators weighing in for a number of days now. And what we get to see is quite revealing, most likely because the post 9/11 and Iraq experiences now allow us to take a look at the carnage in the former Yugoslavia through a very different prism. And if we consider the failures of yesteryear it also becomes clear that we can’t just throw blame at the doorstep of Democrats, liberals or leftists although there was a fair number of appeasers among them. Johann Hari for instance has taken a closer look at the complicity of the British government under conservative prime-minister John Major and the picture is far from pleasant:

But the Tories, led in foreign affairs by Douglas Hurd, did something even worse. They insisted on an arms embargo on the entire Balkan region to prevent weapons being sold to any side. In practice, this guaranteed the Serbs’ massive military superiority at the start of the war was maintained, and – in Anan’s words again – it “effectively prevented the Republic of Bosnia and Herzgovina of its right under the Charter of the United Nations to self-defence.” Milosevic said at his trial that Hurd was effectively giving him “a green light” for the killing, and in a way, he was right.

And there’s more in the article which points to something I remembered witnessing as well in The Netherlands and that was a complete lack of interest in who was killing who and why. Yes, Yugoslavia was – apart from being a favored tourist destination – considered to be some sort of third-tier Europe, inhabited by highly unpredictable savages. That brings me to the weird flip side of that coin which is the equally reprehensible disinterest in the whereabouts and present day activities of the perpetrators. This is an e-mail from one of my regular readers:

I don't know if you have been following the series in the National Post about "Joe Somebody" on Salt Spring Island. He is the 42 year old Croatian who immigrated to Canada and it now appears that he worked with the Serbs in their ethnic cleansing campaign. It seems as if he is a real life war criminal, a brutal murderer. Survivors of the brutal campaigns in Croatia identify him clearly. Anyway, I am kind of shocked at how his Salt Spring Island neighbors don't seem to care about this at all and are saying things like let the poor guy be and let bygones be bygones. Aren't these the same Salt Spring Islanders who protest every injustice that they see perpetrated by the US? Isn't this the home of the Raging Grannies? Is it just me, or is the lack of the sense of outrage kind of weird? I know that "Joe Somebody" is innocent until proven guilty, but the feeling I get from the article is that even if he is guilty, so what, he is a nice guy now. I used to think that Canadians didn't make a big fuss about Nazi war criminals because of some latent anti-Semitism, but now I'm beginning to think that it is just some sort of moral confusion.

The article – one in a series of three - can be found here.

While moral confusion is an interesting way to explain the local response, I don’t expect any different reactions if our Croat handyman turned up making a decent living and be a jovial neighbor anywhere in Europe. Utter disinterest is what would come to mind as a way to describe it, something not that different from moral confusion.

And one more thought. Yes, the civilized world was actually scared of Slobodan Milosevic. It’s only now that he has died a lonely death in a Dutch prison cell that the veil of misinformed conceptions is blown away in order to reveal a highly incompetent and corrupt village despot who could have been removed from power with very little effort as early as 1991, well before the real ethnic cleansing got going. It will be interesting to see if with the third anniversary of the Iraqi invasion coming up this weekend some of its critics will be drawing on the new and revealing light shed on the life and times of another famed and feared butcher.

An excellent and succinct obituary by Christopher Hitchens. Read it all.

As a child and teenager I spent a number of holidays in Yugoslavia which used to have a justified reputation for being one of the friendliest places on the planet, seriously. As such I advertised it to Irene when we embarked on our first holiday together in 1988 which took us by train through most of the Yugoslav nation on our way to Greece. What both of us remember from this part of our trip was the decidedly aggressive atmosphere, ranging from an increased military presence to testosterone-high aggressive youngsters on the trains to appalling scenes of poverty in the Kosovo region. The reason I bring this up is that Hitchens’ piece points to 1987 as the year of Milosevic’s ascendancy and the moment in time in which the train of gruesome hatred and destruction was set in motion. What we witnessed a year later were its first expressions, the initial manifestations of something that had been successfully repressed during decades of communist rule but which Slobodan Milosevic had somehow managed to unleash. I’ve never visited any of the resulting republics again, but I would like to believe that the evil winds have not destroyed the spirit of hospitality by which I got to know the heart of the Balkans.

More than once do I get the question what has prompted my bleak outlook for Europe, and while it is easy to rattle off the standard list of issues and contrast them with North America, there is one that stands out above all the others. Not only because it symbolizes the powerlessness of the continent’s institutional arrangements, but also because it reveals the strong potential for ethnic strife and bloodshed that is residing somewhere deep in Europe’s wounded soul.

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the sheer incompetence of the European Union (and subsequently the UN) to do anything about it stand as the pivotal case study of why any crisis of magnitude simply can not be expected to be resolved by Europe itself. And, it was the first such test following the collapse of the Soviet Union at a time when the spirit of European co-operation and integration was at peak levels. The incompetence and inaction was covered up by ineffective interventions and some bizarre forms of symbolism, I distinctly remember former French President Francois Mitterand’s walk through the ravaged streets of Sarajevo, an empty gesture indeed:

After President Mitterand of France visited Sarajevo most Bosnians and Herzegovinians, including President of Bosnia & Herzegovina Alija Izetbegović, believed that the West would not allow this horror to continue. They were mistaken. Instead of any action designed to stop the slaughter of innocent civilians, the French President recommended that a large United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) be sent to Bosnia & Herzegovina. They were sent to “keep peace” with no peace to keep. Over, 7,000 people were eventually massacred at Srebrenica in 1995, under the “protection” of UN forces. In Omarska, Trnopolje, Manjača and other concentration camps in Serb-held territory, through which over a million civilians were processed as part of a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing, UNPROFOR simply never arrived.

Approximately 10,000 civilians, including 1,500 children, were killed in Sarajevo alone, while it was under UN protection.

Of course I bring this up to as the Balkan-crisis of the 1990s was accelerated by the man who died this weekend in a prison cell in The Hague, Slobodan Milosevic. The conditions of his relatively early departure are highly symbolic. The international body that wasn’t able to restrain him when he set out on his journey of hate, destruction and genocide proved to be as incompetent when they finally had him in their prison cell. Not only was the International Court of Justice the wrong venue to hold Milosevic to account – that should have been in Belgrade, in a Serb court – it had over a period of some four years accomplished very little with only an occasional pyrrhic victory by the weakened defendant reaching the international headlines. And the real butchers, especially Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, are still on the loose.

The other part of deeper significance is that he died on Dutch soil. As much as the EU and UN would like to forget their shameful role in the former Yugoslavia, it is especially the Dutch who are more than a little willing to forget the dreadful performance of its tarnished Dutchbat defending the "safe haven" of Srebrenica. To describe it as a botched defense would be too generous a treatment of history: not a single shot was fired to prevent the subsequent mass murder by Mladic’s thugs.

So in death, the erstwhile butcher of the Balkans has been able to serve up a few painful reminders to those who would be more than willing to forget. And to me and many others struggling with Europe’s difficult journey, another reminder of Europe’s inherent weaknesses.

Not just the Rainbow Warrior. Today it will be ten years ago that the UN (by way of Dutch and French incompetence) walked away from Srebrenica and enabled the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian men and boys.

Here's some background on the Dutch role which led to a parliamentary investigation and the fall of Wim Kok's second coalition cabinet in the spring of 2002. It's one of these issues that awoke Dutch politics and society from its comfortable 1990s slumber of unprecedented growth and budget surplus after budget surplus. The idea that war and evil would come calling this close to home left many perplexed and that attitude played a significant part in the cluelessness of the Dutchbat forces on the ground and of the politicians back home who worked hard to put a palatable veneer on the entire episode. Guilt was of course never apportioned, but that hasn't stopped some surviving family members to sue the Dutch state, I translate:

Two Bosnian families of Srebrenica victims will start legal action against the Dutch state. They argue The Netherlands is complicit in the murder of their family members after the muslim enclave fell in 1995. Their Dutch lawyer reported this.

One electrician was sent off from the UN-base without protection. The family argues that Dutchbat took the risk that he would be murdered.

Witness interviews in The Hague took place over the past two months. During those interviews it became clear that Dutchbat failed to do everything possible to save human lives.

Since Dutchbat operated under the UN umbrella I would think that legal action against that institution would yield better results, but I am no expert on this to be frank. The Dutch government is taking no chances however and refuses to make any apologies and restricts its actions today to meet with some survivors and to express its sympathy. Again, another sad anniversary.

NOTE: In the meantime the Dutch Left knows exactly who is guilty, from the blog of the Dutch member of parliament for the Socialist Party Jan Marijnissen we learn that the failure was that of the US and Britain who unduly influenced UN operations. Of course.

The day after my post about Romeo Dallaire the National Post ran a long piece criticizing Dallaire and I wasn't sure what to make of it, it failed to convince me although I did see what the writers had in mind. It just didn't work for me. It did for Ginna Dowler and after failing to find a link she excerpted a few pieces on her blog and argues that Dallaire failed the test. Her argumentation is sound and I had exactly the same reaction when the Dutch UN contingent in Srebrenica did nothing, and I mean nothing, to prevent the massacre of thousands of assembled refugees in the 'UN safe haven' in 1995:

"The Dutch commander in Srebrenica, Colonel Karremans, then read a statement. The attack on the enclave was an 'excellently planned military operation,' he said. Bosnian Serb. military commander General Ratko Mladic was strategically very clever. 'But he was a commander, not a gentleman. There are no gentlemen in this war.' Karremans added: 'We learned that the parties in Bosnia cannot be divided into "the good guys" and "the bad guys",' apparently referring to Srebrenica's corrupt leaders.

"He said nothing about the treatment of the enclave's civilians and failed to mention the beatings, one execution or nine bodies his soldiers had seen in Potocari. [Lieutenant Vincent] Egbers and thirteen other Dutch peacekeepers had told their superiors of gunshots coming from the Nova Kasaba soccer field on the night of July 13, but Karremans somehow failed to mention it. ...

If you google Karremans you will find lots more, but I think you get it: the Dutch commander not only failed to do anything to safe Bosnian Muslim lives, he couldn't even bring himself to make a moral distinction between the warring parties. Of all people, Robert Fisk has a good summary with this sobering observation:

The Dutch published their own miserable, chilling account of Srebrenica. But Karremans was packed off to become Dutch military attaché in Washington, under orders not to talk. And silent he was, to the great relief of the Dutch.

We can't accuse Dallaire of failing to see the difference between right and wrong, or, for remaining quiet. His book and the documentary of his return to Rwanda are getting ample attention and rightly so. Cynics may argue that Dallaire learned from the Karremans experience and went on a media blitz to defend his record, but having studied the man and the mandate he had, the Canadian commander comes out far cleaner than some of his critics now argue. Sure, he made mistakes and there may be braver people who would have been willing to die to take a stand against the terror in front of them. We can even entertain the notion that the post-war military of left-liberal nations like Canada and Holland has failed to produce the battle-hardened moral men that we like to see when we think of war, or when we watch an epic Hollywood rendition of some historic struggle. Heroes like that are in short supply, reality is different.

So, compared to the disastrous performance of Karremans, Dallaire comes out much better. The real question is how both men would have performed had they been given the physical resources and political support to carry out their respective mandates. And that leads again to an assessment of viability of the UN as an institution to enforce and maintain peace. When comparing Dallaire and Karremans it seems that the former has a far better track record and moral compass to at least contribute to reform and an overhaul of a failed international institution.