Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 118

Summaries

Thorough and balanced? A closer look at the NIOD report, J.W.L. Brouwer

This vast report contains many interesting chapters, notably on the fall of the Srebrenica enclave and the minor political scandals that subsequently erupted in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the report was published in such haste that editing errors abound. This does not make the report easy reading. Furthermore, there are a number of contradictions between the conclusions in the first part and the final conclusions. Lastly, the strong condemnation of Dutch diplomacy in 1991-1993 and, in particular, the denunciation of the Foreign Minister, Mr Van den Broek, is inconsistent with the stated intentions of the authors to refrain from making any political judgements.

‘Information overload...’ The endless reconstruction of a war crime, J.W. Honig

The NIOD-report on Srebrenica chose to ignore the pressing nature of the questions that the massacre had given rise to in the Netherlands and that led to launch of the investigation in 1996. The political and social relevance of the investigation was compromised by the excessive time it took to deliver the report (five-and-a-half years) and its bulk (6600 pages) whose accessibility was further marred by the chronological structure and narrative approach. But even if one accepts the rapporteurs' stated intent that they merely wanted to produce ‘an academic monograph’ then the work has serious shortcomings. A consideration of the

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explanation of the massacre reveals a careless use of primary sources, a continual failure to distinguish clearly the wood for the trees and conclusions that are not properly supported by often confusing and contradictory arguments. Most critically, though the report aims to provide ‘analytical explanatory judgements’, these often fall short. The final conclusions regarding the key question of the main motives behind the massacre therefore not only fail to convince, but the way in which they are arrived at casts serious doubts as to the academic quality and validity of the report as a whole.

The Srebrenica report and the history of present times, P. Lagrou

The Srebrenica report, compiled by the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, is an unprecedented venture into genuinely contemporary history. The enquiry started one year after the massacre in July 1995 and the report was published less than six years later. The Dutch government granted the team of researchers exceptional access to public archives, but the investigation also benefited from the ongoing proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The report produced spectacular political results, culminating in the resignation of the Dutch government, but its implications for the debate on the chronological limits of the exercise of history as a scientific discipline will be longer lasting. Is the self-imposed limit, whereby historians only concern themselves with things past, that are at least a few decades old, merely circumstantial, due to the inaccessibility of the sources, and thus destined to disappear when the rules of access are changed or are they a fundamental condition of the historian's method? The report can be credited with impressive achievements in the reconstruction of the massacre through a thorough combination of very diverse source materials. It also raises fundamental questions in that it shows that a national approach is no longer sufficient to analyse the complex functioning of European politics at the close of the twentieth century. However, the most important objection one can level against the report's approach is that the fundamental problem of exclusive access granted to one specific research team, yet unavailable to contradictory investigations, was considerably aggravated by the redactional choice of a streamlined end-result that does not accommodate dissenting opinions or internal debate.

Judging in the extreme, J.C.H. Blom, B.G.J. de Graaff, D.C.L. Schoonoord

This article is a reply to the remarkably different contributions from J.W.L. Brouwer, J.W. Honig and P. Lagrou. Against this differing background in terms of appreciation for the Srebrenica report and the point of view taken, attention is given to the manner in which the enquiry was conducted. The researchers never intended to produce a definitive history of what happened at Srebrenica, rather their aim was to provide a thorough and meaningful contribution to the debate. A convincing study, both from an international, Dutch and local perspective, could only be produced in the light of the violent disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia and the subsequent involvement of the international community and organisations. Only within that framework could the role of the Netherlands Government and the Dutch military be surveyed. But the main focus of the report is not Dutch history in the making, even if a lot of attention was paid to the Netherlands. It would lead too far afield to agree with Lagrou that the researchers had an unshakeable belief that the verified facts would speak for themselves. Nevertheless, the essence of their enquiry was to work according to the traditional methods of their trade, i.e. to rely on the sources. With regard to Honig's alternative interpretation, there are no grounds for stating that the mass murders and the attack on Srebrenica would have required more advance planning. The available sources point in a different direction.