History's Most Dangerous Safe Area

There are certain place names that have become synonymous with the appalling events that occurred there: Auschwitz, Amritsar – Srebrenica.  On 7 July 1995 – twenty years ago this week – the Bosnian Serb Army overran the town of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia and proceeded over the following days to massacre over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.  The town and its surrounding areas had been declared a United Nations Safe Area back in April 1993.  It was anything but.

The trapped and half-starved population were protected by a small Dutch UN battalion armed only with light weapons and a few APCs.  When the first shells landed within the Srebrenica Safe Area on 6 July 1995, nobody was surprised. For the past two years the Bosnian Serb forces had kept the enclave encircled, shelling and sniping sporadically at the civilian population and the Dutchbat troops, waiting for the international community to tire of their effort to keep the enclaves on life support. The Serbs had been waiting for their moment, and everyone knew it. The fall of Srebrenica had been almost inevitable from the moment it was first declared a Safe Area.

Recovered bodies awaiting re-burial in 2010

The events are as controversial today as they were then.  A UK-sponsored attempt to pass a UN Security Council resolution officially defining the massacre as genocide has caused outcry amongst Bosnian Serbs.  Srebrenica is now situated in the state-within-a-state of Republika Srpska and despite being the only town in the region with a Bosniak mayor, barely masks still-simmering ethnic tensions.  Some Bosnian Serbs are angry that their own war dead are not commemorated in the same way; others deny that the massacre even took place.  7,132 bodies have been recovered from mass graves and reburied; over a thousand are still missing, causing unendurable agony for their surviving relatives.  Despite a court ruling absolving the Dutch troops of any blame for the massacre, many still hold them to account for allowing the Bosnian Serb forces to take the Safe Area and for failing to protect the Bosniak population.

So why, exactly, did a supposed Safe Area end up as the scene of the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War?

Simply put, the Safe Areas should never have been created in the first place. When the Serbs had the town surrounded in March 1993 they offered to let the Muslims go to the relatively safe, government held city of Tuzla and General Phillipe Morillon, Commander of the UN Forces in Bosnia at that time, began to make plans for such an evacuation. However, both the Bosnian government and UN Security Council refused. The Bosnian government objected to the planned evacuation because it believed Srebrenica could later be exchanged for Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo. The international community, on the other hand, opposed the scheme because the Vance-Owen Peace Plan placed Srebrenica in a Muslim canton, and to allow the Serbs to take the town would be, as they saw it, to acquiesce to ethnic cleansing. The outrage of an anti-Serb press shamed the Security Council into passing an essentially meaningless resolution – Resolution 836 - which did little to make Srebrenica a safe area because the member states lacked the political will to follow through on the sentiments invested in the Safe Area resolutions.

The Security Council required peacekeepers to play a war-fighting role, whilst failing to provide them with the weaponry or manpower to do so. They assigned UNPROFOR a mandate which, even if only symbolically, aligned them with the Bosnian Muslims, but expected them to continue to rely on Bosnian Serb consent to deliver humanitarian aid. Not only did the Safe Area resolutions conflict with previous resolutions, they also contradicted themselves, leading to widely different interpretations.  Resolution 836 did not clearly state when air support could be called in, and the use of the word ‘deter’ instead of ‘defend’ left the Safe Areas semantically unprotected. Both the UNPROFOR command and the Dutchbat soldiers within the Srebrenica enclave were left confused as to what they were expected to do.

Once the Safe Areas were created, however, it was only a matter of time before the

Serbs decided to attack. Srebrenica was not betrayed by any formal agreement, but merely by a failure to make any real effort to stop the Serb offensive.  Despite a number of deals to sacrifice Srebrenica being considered by the Bosnian government, there is no evidence that any took place.  There is also no concrete evidence of a deal over the use of air power that UNPROFOR Commander Lieutenant-General Bernard Janvier was rumoured to have made with Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić.

Srebrenica fell because of a lack of will to fight for it on the part of the Bosnian government and the ARBiH, and because UNPROFOR had neither the manpower nor the mandate to defend it. It is possible that earlier use of Close Air Support could have saved the enclave (bungled complications with faxes lead to farcical delays in the arrival of UN planes), but ultimately the UN did not want to provoke the Serbs for fear of reprisals against Dutch hostages taken earlier by Bosnian Serb forces.  Taking UN hostages had been a tactic favoured by the BSA throughout the war, used to humiliate the international community as well as a bargaining chip against greater military reprisals.

Srebrenica was one of three eastern Bosnian towns declared UN Safe Areas.  After Srebrenica fell, the towns of Goražde and Žepa suffered the same fate shortly after.  The problem of the eastern enclaves – pockets of Bosnian Muslims amongst Serb-held territory - had been plaguing peace negotiations for months.  Their fall simplified the political map and made a territorial settlement possible.  If the horrendous massacre had not followed, the fall of Srebrenica would probably have been viewed as an ill-advised mandate leading to a military disaster, and not the terrible catastrophe it ultimately became.  Tragically for Srebrenica and its inhabitants, it was politically expedient to allow the Safe Area to fall.

Refugees from Srebrenica arrive in Tuzla in 1995

Could those Dutch soldiers have ever imagined what would happen next?  There is no doubt, from their testimonies and records, that many of them have been psychologically scarred by it.  As the Bosnian Serb forces closed in on the town, the population fled to nearby Potočari, where the UN battalion had its headquarters.  They were denied entry to the UN compound.  Instead they were handed over to Ratko Mladić and his troops, who promised them safe passage to government-held territory.  Subsequently, the men – including the very elderly and adolescent boys – were separated from the women and children.  Many men and boys attempted to flee to safety through the mountains, but they were malnourished from two years of siege and safe territory was many miles away.  Few made it.  Those who did not were rounded up along with the others and shot, and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.

The Srebrenica Memoial Centre at Potočari, opened in 2003

There is little wonder that the horrific events of those days in July still stir passions in a country that remains divided by memories of a war that irreparably destroyed communities.  It is unclear whether the relatives of the victims will ever find closure, even if all the missing bodies are found and Mladić, currently awaiting trial in The Hague, is finally convicted for the crime.  Any such closure, however, is unlikely to be reached until there is acceptance on all sides that the massacre did happen, that it was awful, and that reconciliation is possible.  Twenty years on, there is a new generation of Bosnians coming of age who were born after the war ended.  They are the country’s best chance of fighting the tired propaganda, shaking off the divisions of the past and looking towards a more hopeful future.