The Netherlands suppresses Srebrenica

Commenting on the 15th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica on Sunday cultural historian Thomas van der Dunk reflects in his blog for the daily De Volkskrant on how the Netherlands deals with war missions: "We don't dare officially admit that war is an exceedingly dirty business in which 'our boys' also run huge risks. ... What always counts more than anything else are our good intentions rather than the results. ... We like to project our image of people with good intentions on others in a bid to ignore the hopelessness of certain missions. After all, we can't abandon these people to their fate, can we? This is ... once again the argument for extending the operations in Afghanistan. The painful truth however is that you can't always help, or that helping has a price - a lot more troops and many more dead soldiers - that we're not willing to pay."

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