Netherlands apologies to survivors of Srebrenica genocide

The Netherlands offered its apologies for the role played by Dutch peacekeepers in the Srebrenica genocide. For the first time since the 1995 massacre, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren apologized to survivors for the Dutch peacekeepers' failure to prevent the killings. During a ceremony in Potocari, Ollongren said, the international community failed to offer adequate protection to the people of Srebrenica. The Dutch government shares responsibility for the situation in which that failure occurred. And for this, we offer our deepest apologies.

The international community failed to offer adequate protection to the people of Srebrenica. And as part of that community, the Dutch government shares political responsibility for the situation in which that failure occurred. For this we offer our deepest apologies. pic.twitter.com/CwfNMyV122

— Kajsa Ollongren (@DefensieMin) July 11, 2022

The Srebrenica killings came at the tail end of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Bosnian Serb forces overran the Dutch UN protection zone at Srebrenica and massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys. The slaughter, judged an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, was the worst single atrocity of the war, in which about 100,000 people died. The discovery of skeletal remains from the massacre have become rare in recent years, even though some 1,200 people have still not been found, according to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia-Herzegovina.