'Nobody Could Have Foreseen Srebrenica': Dutch Court Told

THE HAGUE, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 06th Oct, 2016 ) - The Dutch government on Thursday appealed against a court ruling which found it liable for the deaths of over 300 Bosnians during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, saying nobody could have forseen a genocide.

"Nobody would have thought that a genocide could possibly take place in Europe in 1995," government lawyer Bert-Jan Houtzagers told an appeals court in The Hague. In 2014, a Dutch court ruled that Dutch UN peacekeepers were responsible for the deaths of some 300 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in July 1995.

The court said the peacekeepers should not have expelled the victims from their UN base at Potocari near Srebrenica after it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. Victims' families had sued the Dutch government, accusing the peacekeepers of failing to protect some 8,000 men and boys slaughtered by ethnic Bosnian Serb forces just before the end of the Bosnian war.

The Dutch soldiers "placed their safety above everything else," said Marco Gerritsen, a lawyer representing many of the victims' families.