The report admits UN complicity in the genocide at the UN "Safe Area" of Srebrenica in July 1995, during which between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian civilians, unarmed men and boys, were separated out in front of UN troops and led away for extermination, and many Bosnian women were brutalized. In the UN Report on Srebrenica, the following conclusion applies to Srebrenica but also throughout Bosnia from 1992 until NATO began its airstrikes in the fall of 1995:

467. The tragedy that took place following the fall of Srebrenica is shocking for two reasons. It is shocking, first and foremost,for the magnitude of the crimes committed. Not since the horrors of World War II had Europe witnessed massacres on this scale. The mortal remains of close to 2,500 men and boys have been found on the surface, in mass grave sites and in secondary burial sites. Several thousand more men are still missing, and there is every reason to believe that additional burial sites, many of which have been probed but not exhumed, will reveal the bodies of thousands more men and boys. The great majority of those who were killed were not killed in combat: the exhumed bodies of the victims show large numbers had their hands bound, or were blindfolded, or were shot in the back or the back of the head. Numerous eyewitness accounts, now well corroborated by forensic evidence, attest to scenes of mass slaughter of unarmed victims.

468. The fall of Srebrenica is also shocking because the enclaves inhabitants believed that the authority of the United Nations Security Council, the presence of UNPROFOR peacekeepers, and the might of NATO air power, would ensure their safety. Instead, the Serb forces ignored the Security Council, pushed aside the UNPROFOR troops, and assessed correctly that air power would not be used to stop them. They overran the safe area of Srebrenica with ease, and then proceeded to depopulate the territory within 48 hours. Their leaders then engaged in high-level negotiations with representatives of the international community while their forces on the ground executed and buried thousands of men and boys within a matter of days.

469. Questions must be answered, and foremost among these are the following: how can this have been allowed to happen? And how will the United Nations ensure that no future peacekeeping operation witnesses such a calamity on its watch? In this assessment, factors ranging from the most proximate to the more over-arching will be discussed, in order to provide the most comprehensive analysis possible of the preceding narrative.

The report goes on to detail the complicity of UN General Betrand Janvier and UN Special Representative Yasushi Akashi in the tragedy, their repeated refusals to take seriously the threat posed by the Serb army to civilians and their repeated refusal to authorized air support to defend the "Safe Area." In a open repudiation of the UN role in Bosnia, the UN report states:

495. Nonetheless, the key issue -- politically, strategically and morally -- underlying the security of the "safe areas" was the essential nature of "ethnic cleansing". As part of the larger ambition for a "Greater Serbia," the Serbs set out to occupy the territory of the enclaves; they wanted the territory for themselves. The civilian inhabitants of the enclaves were not the incidental victims of the attackers; their death or removal was the very purpose of the attacks upon them. The tactic of employing savage terror, primarily mass killings, rapes and brutalization of civilians, to expel populations was used to the greatest extent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it acquired the now-infamous euphemism of "ethnic cleansing". The Bosnian Muslim civilian population thus became the principal victim of brutally aggressive military and para-military Serb operations to depopulate coveted territories in order to allow them to be repopulated by Serbs.

496. The failure to fully comprehend the extent of the Serb war aims may explain in part why the Secretariat and the Peacekeeping Mission did not react more quickly and decisively when the Serbs initiated their attack on Srebrenica. In fact, rather than attempting to mobilize the international community to support the enclave's defence we gave the Security Council the impression that the situation was under control, and many of us believed that to be the case. The day before Srebrenica fell we reported that the Serbs were not attacking when they were. We reported that the Bosniacs had fired on an UNPROFOR blocking position when it was the Serbs. We failed to mention urgent requests for air power. In some instances in which incomplete and inaccurate information was given to the Council, this can be attributed to problems with reporting from the field. In other instances, however, the reporting may have been illustrative of a more general tendency to assume that the parties were equally responsible for the transgressions that occurred. It is not clear in any event, that the provision of more fully accurate information to the Council B many of whose Members had independent sources of information on the ongoing events B would have led to appreciably different results.

One need only add that this refusal to recognize the Serb nationalist aims was one made in the face of three years of massive and consistent atrocities by Serb forces and open statements by Serb nationalist leaders. The UN report also discusses the actions of the Dutchbat (Dutch UN Battalion) in Srebrenica in helping the Serb army select victims for extermination and refusing to report the atrocities. It does not detail the racism in the Dutchbat batallion, the Dutchbat senior officer drinking a toast with Mladic after he gave Srebrenica over to Mladic's killers, Dutchbat soldiers running over fleeing civilians in the armored vehicles, and the destruction of key evidence that was turned over to Dutch authorities. A new film takes up these issues. Thomas Keenan of JUSTWATCH (22 Novembers 1999) writes of "A Cry from the Grave":

Those of us in the US who have been able to see rough cuts of the soon-to-be-aired BBC documentary on Srebrenica, A Cry From the Grave, can only hope that the final version shows up somewhere soon on American television. BBC's Nick Fraser summarized in Sunday's Telegraph: In the era of the video camera, both the Dutch [UN battalion] and the Serbs filmed the final days of the UN's "safe area. "Srebrenica was effectively handed over to the Serbs, who claimed that they wanted to question the town's Muslim male population to search for "war criminals".In a documentary about the massacre, to be shown on the BBC this week, previously unseen video film shot by the Serbs shows the Dutch [UN]troops fraternising with the Serb force. They even toast the health of Serb officers and accept gifts. The Dutch are subsequently shown carousing happily in the Croatian capital Zagreb in celebrations they themselves captured on video. The impression given is that they felt they had performed a painful job adequately. The behaviour of the troops has caused an outcry in the Netherlands, although nowadays the official Dutch explanation is that their orders were ambiguous.

For further documentation, photos, and essays on Srebrenica see the Srebrenica link toward the bottom of the reports page.

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