Escape to Srebrenica Between and , Bosnia and Herzegovina was under attack by Serb and Croat forces aiming to carve the country up into a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia, respectively. Vahid Suljic, standing next to the UN soldier and facing the camera, is pictured in this photo from Srebrenica [Courtesy of Vahid Suljic] Fearing they could soon face a similar fate, the Suljic family escaped to nearby woods where they hid for about two weeks.
Dutch UN peacekeepers sit on top of an armoured personnel carrier as Bosniak Muslim refugees from Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, seek refuge in the nearby village of Potocari [File: AP Photo] Suljic witnessed Serb forces, dressed in UN uniforms to impersonate Dutch soldiers, entering freely and observing everyone at the base. Suljic said Dutch soldiers did nothing to stop what Serb forces were doing.
They had total control over the base. Suljic said still smouldering tensions and genocide denial pose grave risks for the future. More from News. UN climate negotiations enter final day as differences remain. Sri Lanka limits size of public events ahead of opposition rally.
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The answer, in part, lies in the horrors witnessed by Srebrenica—a sense that this time the Bosnian Serbs had gone too far. That certainly proved to be the case in the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary William Perry and JCS Chairman John Shalikashvili took the lead in pushing for the kind of vigorous air campaign that was finally agreed to in London.
With presidential elections a little over a year away, the White House in particular felt the need to find a way out. It was a way out that the president demanded from his foreign policy team in June This strategy for the first time matched force and diplomacy in a way that would break the policy impasse that had strangled Washington for so long.
It was debate by the president and his senior advisers over the course of three days in August and, when accepted by Clinton, became the basis for the diplomatic triumph in Dayton three months later.
He began to meet informally with key people on his NSC staff including his deputy, Sandy Berger, and his chief Bosnia aides Sandy Vershbow and Nelson Drew to consider how the United States could help to change the tide of war.
It had long been clear that progress toward a negotiated settlement was possible only if the Bosnian Serbs understood that not achieving a diplomatic solution would cost them dearly. For nearly a year, the United States and its Contact Group partners Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had sought to pressure the Bosnian Serb leadership headquartered in Pale into agreeing to commence serious negotiations by convincing Milosevic to cut off economic and, especially, military assistance to the Bosnian Serbs.
Despite being offered various incentives including direct negotiations with the United States and the suspension of U. This left military pressure—the threat or actual use of force against the Bosnian Serbs—as the only real lever to convince Pale that a diplomatic solution was in its interests.
Yet, more than two years of trying to convince the NATO allies of this fact had led nowhere. At each and every turn, London, Paris, and other allies had resisted the kind of forceful measures that were required to make a real impact on the Bosnian Serb leadership.
In their informal discussions, Vershbow and Drew suggested that the only way to overcome this resistance was to equalize the risks between the United States on the one hand and those allies with troops on the ground on the other.
This could be achieved either by deploying U. Since the president had consistently ruled out deploying American ground forces to Bosnia except to help enforce a peace agreement, the only way significant military pressure could be brought to bear on the Bosnian Serbs would be after UNPROFOR had been withdrawn. In June , she once again made her case, presenting Clinton with a passionately argued memorandum urging a new push for air strikes in order to get the Bosnian Serbs to the table.
As Clinton well knew, the U. Instead, the emphasis should be on keeping the U. He could accept that there was no consensus for anything beyond continuing a policy of muddling through, or he could forge a new strategy and get the president to support a concerted effort seriously to tackle the Bosnia issue once and for all.
Having for over two years accepted the need for consensus as the basis of policy and, as a consequence, failed to move the ball forward, Lake now decided that the time had come to forge his own policy initiative. A consensus soon emerged on three key aspects of a workable strategy. Second, if a deal was to be struck between the parties, it was clear that such an agreement could not fulfill all demands for justice.
A diplomatic solution that reversed every Bosnian Serb gain simply was not possible. Witnesses spoke of streets littered with corpses. Under-equipped Dutch soldiers witnessing the Serb aggression did nothing and about 5, Muslims sheltering at their base were handed over.
A UN tribunal in The Hague that investigated the events later spoke of the huge amount of planning that went into the massacre.
Buses carrying women and children were systematically search for males, and often troops took young boys and elderly men who would not have been eligible to serve in the army.
The effects of that massacre still reverberate to this day. New mass graves and bodies of victims are still being discovered, 25 years after the genocide. A report blamed the Dutch government and military officials for failing to prevent the killings. The entire government resigned in the wake of the report. In , the country's supreme court upheld a ruling that the Netherlands was partially responsible for deaths at Srebrenica.
The commander had gone into hiding after the end of the war in and was not found until , in his cousin's home in northern Serbia. Serbia has since apologised for the crime but still refuses to accept this was a genocide.
All images copyrighted. Massacre survivor: 'The soil is soaked with blood'. Living proof: Surviving a massacre. Mladic Srebrenica footage shown.
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