| What are we doing?
April 11th, 2002 So who's the laughing third?  What we're doing? Groaning, for astonishment and anger at articles like this one. After all this time, a report arrives that tells the truth, and we still continue to lose ourselves in bickering over minor aspects of it all. It's bloody damn likely you would leave your military affairs to your minister of Defence, being the prime minister. That's what he's there for, after all. You're not a dictator of a banana republic, when you're the premier of the Netherlands.
What's more, at the time of Dutchbat's seconding, Kok was the Treasurer. And all this time, everyone ignores Kofi Annan's report (A/54/549) (in PDF) which describes in detail how the Netherlands, politicians and military alike, were ruthlessly abandoned by an international community that did not care to lift a finger, the EU (Sweden for instance, which according to previously struck but never lived up to deals was supposed to have guarded Srebrenica before Dutchbat did accept the challenge), at its front. Yes, Dutchbat could have made different choices. But Dutchbat would have had to senselessly fight itself to death, without a mandate, without weapons more serious than peashooters, and without support. It is the international community that should have made different choices. Considering the long term and our right to vote, this is a community all of us are part of in the end, are we not? So. Can we now finally stop this nonsense, and do what an American friend (girl) advised me to do at the time of the drama, namely to be proud of and grateful for the correct and human behaviour of our own troops? Be glad that, this time, we can. It has been different in the past (in Indonesia, namely). Moreover, we might then be able to finally direct our attention towards principal matters. Such as the man who's deserved that attention ever since 1996. Why is Ratko Mladic not yet in front of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague? Why, by the by, isn't Ariel Sharon? This, I should think, is much more important than the politically correct arresting of a few Dutch generals who did what half of Holland always does and our society teaches us to do from birth onwards: cover their asses. |