Srebrenica mothers lodge 875m claim against Dutch army

THE Mothers of Srebrenica pressure group has launched an 875 million compensation claim against the Dutch government and the UN for failing to prevent the worst European massacre since World War II.

Meanwhile, the UN war crimes court said yesterday it will hear the appeal this month of the first man to be found guilty of genocide for the massacre in Srebrenica.

An entire generation of Muslim men, numbering 7,000, were slaughtered by the Serbian army in the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in 1995.

Dutch peacekeeping troops were sent to protect the minority population sheltering in the UN-designated safe area of Srebrenica, but surrendered to the heavily-armed Serbian invaders without firing a shot in July 1995.

In the confusion that followed, the Serbs separated all of the males from the women and slaughtered the men and boys. More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb troops led by Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic and Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic.

The Srebrenica massacre was the worst case of genocide in Europe since World War II, and a report from the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) placed much of the blame on the Dutch government, military commanders and the UN.

The report led to the fall of the Wim Kok coalition Cabinet in April 2002.

Lawyers representing the Srebrenica survivors said.

the complaint against the UN had been lodged with US courts, while the complaint against the Dutch government had been submitted to the Dutch judicial system.

US international human rights professor Francis Boyle, representing survivors of the massacre, previously failed in the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to have the commander of the Dutch troops, Tom Karremans, held accountable for the massacre.

The Mothers of Srebrenica will be represented by a team of international lawyers, including American and Dutch nationals.

Krstic, who led the troops involved in the 1995 slaughter in the UN-protected Muslim enclave, was convicted in August 2001, and sentenced to 46 years in prison for what is regarded as the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II.