Joyce van de Bildt: Srebrenica – a Dutch national trauma

ABSTRACT: “The Srebrenica genocide of 1995 and the failure of Dutch peacekeeping troops to protect the enclave have brought about a lingering, painful national debate in the Netherlands. Almost two decades after the fall of Srebrenica, the issue remains sensitive in Dutch society. From the extensive amount of Dutch writing, analyses and investigations into what happened in Srebrenica one can conclude that the Dutch public felt the obligation to approach the issue as a party that had been directly involved in the events. Academics, journalists and artists, as well as involved army personnel and members of the Dutch government, engaged in discussing responsibility and culpability, and thoroughly examined what could have been done differently. This debate resulted in a painful self-investigation of Dutch society and politics. A feeling of guilt was widespread, and the capability of Dutch politicians and army has been seriously questioned. All of the activities related to Srebrenica – ranging from writing to composing music, and from public demonstrations to donating money to survivors – are attempts to deal with a national trauma.”

The gibberish of this “scholarly research article” illustrates perfectly what Diana Johnstone called “the uses of Srebrenica.” In this particular case the aim is to induce an irrational guilt complex in the Dutch people, making them and their government more psychologically and politically manipulable and blackmailable on many levels. As a sustained argument purporting to justify the need for Dutch guilt over anything that happened in Srebrenica, the article is a demonstrable intellectual failure. That fact, however, does not disable its nefarious effects. For example, the mind-set that informs Joyce van de Bildt’s pathetic analysis underlies a Dutch court’s absurd decision that the Dutch state is “30% responsible” for the deaths of Srebrenica refugees in Potočari in July 1995, whatever that should mean in practical legal terms. That paradigmatic judgement was not in any manner motivated by coherent legal reasoning, but rather by the irrational guilt complexes reflected in this article, richly complemented by the unbending imperatives of political correctness.

Srebrenica: A Dutch national trauma