I've always liked the Dutch. Perhaps it is because my ancestors are Dutch, but I prefer to think it is because they are easy going laid back people who speak excellent English. However, even I am finding it difficult to fathtom why they are honouring the Dutch soldiers who were in Srebrenica when 10,000 Bosnian Muslims they were there to protect were massacred. 
Read the story HERE.
It is difficult for me to comprehend the situation the Dutch troops must have been in, hamstrung by rules meaning they felt they could not act to protect the muslims in the town. However, there is also evidence to show they could have done more, much more, to protect the people they were there to protect. A documentary made a few years ago indicated that the Dutch put up little resistance to the Serbs and appeared, certainly to the Serbs, to be passive and unwilling to make a stand. The report HERE indicates that whilst the Dutch commander was calling for a NATO air strike at the start, this never happened. Later on the report claims Dutch soldiers were even helping the Serbs with the ethnic cleansing by lifting Muslims on to lorries !
I'm sure that given the chance many of those Dutch soldiers would act differently now, hindsight is, after all, always 20:20, however, giving them a special insignia, as the Dutch government has seems appallingly crass given that they did nothing and 10,000 people were massacred.
2 comments:
The Dutch government did the unthinkable -- in the UK at least -- and resigned over the matter, albeit three weeks before a general election. However, this really screwed the civil servants; they still had a shed-load of policies to get through before the election, only to find themselves without a government to sign off on it. You can't please any of the people any of the time, it seems.
Nice to see you comment Norfolk Dumpling. Your's was the first blog I put a link to when I set up my blog.
How has this business gone down in The Netherlands ?
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