The UN must also be held to account for Srebenica massacre

THE recent capture of the Bosnian Serb war leader and general Ratko Mladic and the declaration of his being fit to stand trial for war crimes, most notably Srebrenica in 1995, has brought with it its own irony.

Over the last 16 years and outside the bounds of the Holocaust, the place name ranks alongside Katyn, Amritsar and Sharpeville in terms of 20th century atrocity sites.

Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in the safe haven of Srebrenica that was supposed to be under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers.

Yet despite the recent appeal and blame being attributed to the Milosevic government of the day, Mladic is going to be tried in a country whose government of the day dispatched troops, under the auspices of the UN, to protect this safe haven.

While peacekeeping exhibited some failures in the run up to Srebrenica, most notably Rwanda the year before, as an atrocity it could have been prevented.

Action, as opposed to inaction, to protect the safe haven could have been taken to prevent such a huge male loss of life that has left scars for years to come on a generation.

Although the central aim of the trial when it goes ahead in The Hague will be to prosecute Mladic for war crimes committed at Srebrenica and other sites, for the sake of the victims’ families; the case should also be reopened on the UN and, indeed, the Dutch government of the day.

Politicians and UN personnel have questions to answer, despite the hope they may have had that it would just go away with the passage of time.

Recognition of this fact would certainly contribute to the healing process and would hopefully lead to a sense of renewal. The recent improvement of relations between Russia and Poland over what happened at Katyn are a testament to this.

While the Bosnian war itself, which started in 1992 and concluded in 1995 with the Dayton Accord, brought with it a huge level of chaos, destruction and death and reintroduced such terms as ethnic cleansing back into the English language to another generation, the pending trial of one of its central figures will reopen old wounds for a region of Europe that is trying to move on, hoping to gain EU membership and wants to put the past behind it.

After all the EU has been through recently, a long drawn out trial is not something it has the stomach for.

* Garrett Kelly is a graduate of Dublin City University's masters programme in international relations.