Families of people killed in 1995's Srebrenica massacre said on Thursday that Dutch military prosecutors had concluded an investigation of three Dutch UN peacekeeping officers and that a decision was pending on whether they would be formally charged with failure to prevent atrocities against Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica area of eastern Bosnia, committed by Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladic in July 1995.
Hasan Nuhanovic, who had worked as an interpreter with the UN peacekeeping force in Srebrenica and who had lost his parents and a younger brother in the massacre, and the family of Rizo Mustafic, who had been killed by Serb forces although he had worked with the Dutch UN Battalion, claim that the Dutch government was responsible for the failure of the Dutch UN contingent to protect their families.
"We filed an application with the Military Prosecutor's Office in Arnhem, Netherlands, with the assistance of our legal representative, Ms Liesbeth Zegveld, at a time when the Appellate Chamber of the District Court in The Hague was deciding on our appeal in our lawsuit against the State of the Netherlands. We sued the State of the Netherlands for the same reasons we pressed charges against the three officers," Nuhanovic told Bosnian media.
Charges were brought against former Dutch Battalion commander Thom Karremans, his deputy Rob Franken and officer B.J. Oosterveen.
In another case, in its ruling of 5 July 2011, the Appellate Chamber of the Hague District Court found the State of the Netherlands responsible for the deaths of three Bosniaks in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's single worst atrocity since the Second World War.
