Posted on 04/24/2002 3:48:33 PM PDT by knighthawk
Wim Kok did the honourable thing. He was prime minister when more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers were slaughtered by Serb troops. The Dutch battalion (Dutchbat), unwilling to risk their own lives, handed the victims over to their butchers. So last week, after the publication of an exhaustive Dutch report, Wim Kok took responsibility - not for the killings, of course, but for having let them happen under his watch.
Such a principled move is rare enough. The French, whose dealings with the Serbs were often dubious, to say the least, never did anything of the kind. Politics had something to with all this. Kok's term as the benign patriarch of a left-right coalition government was beginning to come unstuck anyway. Still, it was a gentlemanly way to go.
The question is how Dutchbat got suckered into such a ghastly situation in the first place. What did they think they were doing in July 1995, scattered about in so-called observation posts around Srebrenica, lightly armed, without proper intelligence and with nowhere near enough men to take on the Serb army?
When they were offered secret equipment by the CIA to intercept Serb communications, they turned it down, apparently because it would not have been in line with UN directives. And close air support, from Nato fighters, was denied them by the UN, because of fear that the Serbs might take more UN personnel as hostages. To promise protection to Bosnian civilians under such circumstances was folly. No other country - not France, not Britain, let alone the US - would ever have accepted such a mission. But the Dutch did, and now they are stuck with a reputation for being collaborators in mass murder. How could they have been so foolish?
One salient fact about my compatriots is how hardnosed, even ruthless, they can be in business, and how naive they often are in international affairs. This is the result, I suppose, of having been a mercantile nation for more than 300 years. The last Dutch military victories - apart from crushing the odd native rebellion in the East Indies - were against the English in the 17th century. Holland was spent as a military power when the British took over the seas. After that, business was all.
Like true merchants, the Dutch have often assumed that they could stay out of trouble, as long as they kept their heads down when the big boys went to war. A policy of neutrality kept them out of the first world war, and like true naifs, they thought they could get away with it again when Hitler started to help himself to chunks of Europe. Alas, virtually all the Dutch had to put up against the Nazi Heinkels and Messerschmitts were a handful of Fokker biplanes.
After the war, the Dutch became a nation of do-gooders and moralists. The do-gooding - huge amounts of development aid, diplomatic initiatives against Greek colonels and so on - was often a fine thing; the moralising, often less so. There is something presumptuous about a small country in Europe taking on the role as the "guiding nation" (gidsland) in international morality. But in 1995, the Dutch, to their credit, knew that preaching and doling out money were not enough. Something more had to be done about ethnic cleansing in Europe. And so they decided to punch above their weight.
The idea that Dutch troops in UN blue helmets could cope with an army on the rampage was as naive as the assumption that Hitler could be kept away by neutrality. The fact that neither the UN, nor any of the larger powers, did anything to help them, was something worse than naive.
For the sorry tale of Dutch do-gooding contains some pointers which reach well beyond the borders of Holland. First, it should cure us of any illusion that sending UN peacekeepers on military missions can end in anything but disaster. Soldiers cannot be neutral in a war. Some misguided people may really have believed that the presence of blue helmets would stop the Serbs from their murderous enterprise. But, in fact, the UN troops offered a handy reason for Britain, France, and the US, powers that could actually have made a difference, not even to try. The Dutch did not get air support because blue helmets were at risk. The UN stood in the way of a military solution. And that suited London, Paris and Washington fine.
In fact, the UN has been used as an alibi for much more than inaction in the former Yugoslavia. The notion that the UN can solve military crises has been an excuse for, as it were, the Dutchification of much of Europe. Most Europeans after the second world war, with the possible exception of some Brits, but certainly including the Germans, wanted to be like the Dutch since the 17th century: prosperous traders with strong neutralist tendencies. European power and pride would be economic, or cultural, but no longer invested in war.
A glance at British royal funerals shows that military pride, and a flair for soldierly pomp, is still part of the British sense of nationhood. The flame of French gloire has not been totally extinguished yet either. But, by and large, postwar Europe has disarmed. When we are faced with serious violence, we look to the UN. And when the UN cannot stop it, the Americans must be prevailed upon. And then, often as not, we moralise, call them cowboys and earn their contempt. The Dutch took the rap for it but the massacre at Srebrenica is really the responsibility of all Europeans, including, in this instance, the British. For when you are faced by killers, do-gooding no longer does good.
Albanians must be made to pay for all that they have done, including obtaining help from evil Americans Madeline Albright, Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Serbia lives, Serbia is not dead yet.
I loved the bit about everyone calling the Americans "cowboys" when we answer their call for help.
Unlike the debacle in Viet Nam, the U.S.'s military leaders today have an over-all plan before sending our troops anywhere. Those plans include the needed support to complete their objective with a minimum of loss of life to our troops. Those plans also include an exit strategy that attempts to avoid protracted presence once the objective has been accomplished.
The UN doesn't have a clue, or a plan, and could care less about the welfare of their "peace-keepers" (unless they are Arab). The Dutch got a raw deal, as the UN didn't send them in with sufficient force or back-up to attain the goal they had been given.
It is the UN that should withdraw from the field, or at least offer an apology!!
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