Survivors of a 1995 massacre in Bosnia appeared in a Dutch court on Thursday to start proceedings aimed at obtaining compensation from the Dutch government because its soldiers failed to protect them.
The outcome of the civil suit could affect the legal liability of nations providing troops for UN peacekeeping operations.
The suit, which is still in a pretrial stage, has been brought by two Bosnian Muslim families whose members were killed while they were in the UN "safe haven" of Srebrenica as Serbian and Bosnian Serb forces overran the area.
The few hundred lightly armed Dutch soldiers who were part of the UN forces in Bosnia said they had neither the manpower nor the weapons to defend the estimated 30,000 Muslims who had sought refuge in the town. The Serbs killed up to 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys there, an operation since defined as genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal.
The slaughter with Dutch troops in the vicinity has haunted the Netherlands. There have been several investigations into the decisions made by its government and soldiers regarding Srebrenica.
One government resigned in 2002, saying it accepted political responsibility for the failure of its forces to protect those seeking refuge. The UN also said it had failed to protect Srebrenica in a 1999 report.
But the lawyers representing the Muslim families said that accepting political and moral responsibility was not enough.
"The big legal question is to establish liability, and the Dutch government and the United Nations have both turned that down," said Liesbeth Zegveld, one of the lawyers.
"There is a legal gap here. There have been grave human-rights crimes and the victims should have remedy and receive damages," she said.
The lawyers have tried to press their case for more than two years and have been turned away by at least one court.
But a district court in The Hague has agreed to hold hearings to determine if there are sufficient grounds to bring a case against the government.
If it goes forward, the lawyers said, other families from Srebrenica, some of whom live in the Netherlands, could join the suit at a later stage.
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