Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre are set to file a suit in a French court, demanding financial compensation from the United Nations for "abandoning" the Muslim enclave of Bosnia. The case will be filed with an administrative court in Paris by the group's Toulouse-based lawyer, Agnes Casero, who says she is representing 329 Srebrenica survivors. Up to 8,000 Muslim males were killed in the Srebrenica slaughter, the worst in Europe since World War II. In mid-October the Bosnian Serb Government issued a report on Srebrenica, admitting the scale of the crime for the first time. Serb authorities had previously downplayed the killing, classed as an act of genocide by the UN War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. However, the report's toll of up to 8,000 victims is in line with independent estimates. Ms Casero told a press conference in Toulouse, southern France, that the suit could have been filed in another UN member nation but that as she was a French lawyer the group had decided to take the action in Paris.
Bosnian Serb war-time leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander, Ratko Mladic, both charged by the UN court for war crimes and genocide in Srebrenica, still remain at large. A Dutch battalion serving with the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia was tasked to protect Srebrenica Muslims but failed to do so. The entire Dutch government resigned in 2002 after a damning official report blamed the country's political and military leaders for giving their peacekeepers an "impossible" mission to protect the enclave. In June, Srebrenica survivors had given the Dutch authorities a proposal for an out-of-court settlement for two billion euros as compensation for failing to prevent the massacre. In July Ms Casero began the procedure in Geneva by lodging a demand, addressed to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. She warned then that a failure to reply would lead to action in the Paris court. At her press conference, Ms Casero said that today the poorest of the massacre's survivors lived in camps and the others were forced to live abroad. "This massacre was committed under the spotlight of the whole world, with the presence of the UN and nothing was done," she said. "From this point of view Srebrenica is not a massacre like the others." |