On 11 July 2003, large posters appeared on the streets of Sarajevo, showing a young woman staring directly at the camera.
Handwritten in English across the image were the words:
No teeth…?
A moustache…?
Smell like shit…?
Bosnian girl!
At the bottom, a caption explained: “Graffiti by an unknown Dutch soldier on the wall of the army barracks in Potocari, Srebrenica, 1994/95. Royal Netherlands Army troops, part of the UN Protection Force (Unprofor) in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995, were responsible for the Srebrenica safe area.”
The work, which gained international recognition after being exhibited in galleries around the world, was created by Sarajevo-based artist Sejla Kameric, using a photograph taken by local photographer Tarik Samarah in Potocari sometime after 2001.
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Three decades later, I hear renewed calls for UN peacekeepers to be deployed to Gaza and other parts of Palestine.
But I struggle to see what benefit that would bring to people living under occupation, denied even their most basic rights – including the right to live.
The UN’s betrayal
Eight years before Kameric created her artwork, on the morning of 3 July 1995, military and police forces led by convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic entered the city of Srebrenica.
After more than three years under siege, tens of thousands of residents fled.
The genocide in Srebrenica was committed in plain sight of UN peacekeepers, who failed not only to prevent it but even to attempt to stop it
They moved towards the UN base in Potocari, desperate for protection and hoping that the several hundred Dutch peacekeepers stationed there since 1993 would provide it.
Soon, more than 6,000 people were crammed inside the UN compound, with another 20,000 sheltering in nearby buildings.
On 11 July 1995, Mladic’s troops began separating men from women, children, and the elderly.
Buses arrived to transport around 25,000 people out of Srebrenica to areas outside Mladic’s control.
The remaining men – more than 8,000 – were taken away, and most were never seen alive again. Those whose remains were found, sometimes just a single bone, are now buried in the Memorial Centre, the site of the former UN base.
Seven identified bones will be buried on 11 July this year, 30 years after the genocide. Thousands more are still missing.
For Bosnians, on that sweltering July day in 1995, even the idea of UN protection died in Potocari.
The genocide in Srebrenica was committed in plain sight of UN peacekeepers, who failed not only to prevent it but even to attempt to stop it.
The primary concern for the UN and the international community became how to evacuate the Dutch soldiers and international personnel from Srebrenica.
They did not request reinforcements, although they could have. They did not use their weapons to defend civilians. They stood by as people were separated, murdered, expelled, raped and robbed.
For years after that summer, no one entered the UN base in Potocari. When people finally gained access in 2001, they found graffiti left behind by Dutch soldiers – including the one used in Kameric’s artwork.
When exactly the graffiti was written is unclear, but it tells us how Dutch soldiers saw the women who were – like everyone else in Srebrenica – trapped in a besieged city, holding on to their bare lives.
In October 1995, Human Rights Watch published its first report on Srebrenica and the UN’s role. It concluded: “Although the safe areas may have been created with good intentions, in actuality, they became UN-administered ethnic ghettos.”
(Un)safe areas
After the war ended with the signing of the peace agreement in December 1995, survivors from Srebrenica began their long struggle for justice.
They demanded – and continue to demand – that the bodies of all the disappeared be found and identified, and that those responsible for the crimes be brought to justice.
Part of this struggle, led primarily by survivor women’s associations, focused on holding the UN and the Dutch battalion accountable.
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Some even launched court cases in the Netherlands. In one of the first, 11 plaintiffs accused the Netherlands and the UN of failing to prevent genocide. But in July 2008, a Dutch court dismissed the case, stating that it had no jurisdiction over the UN, citing the organisation’s immunity from prosecution for crimes committed during missions.
Following this ruling, a group of survivors filed a new lawsuit, this time against the Dutch government. They argued that, although the soldiers were part of a UN mission, the Dutch government still had de facto control over its troops in Srebrenica.
Dutch courts initially dismissed this case too, claiming that the Dutch battalion peacekeepers were acting under a UN mandate and were therefore not the responsibility of the Dutch state – a catch-22.
Finally, after years of legal battles and several court rulings, in 2019 the Dutch Supreme Court found the state partially responsible – but only for 10 percent of the deaths of 350 Bosnian men who had been expelled from the UN compound.
The court reasoned that there was a 10 percent chance the Dutch soldiers could have prevented the killings had they acted differently.
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During the war in Bosnia, six cities – including Srebrenica and Sarajevo, where I live – were declared UN “safe areas” by the UN Security Council.
Peacekeepers were deployed but with no clear mandate, including on whether troops were authorised to use force to protect civilians.What we, the civilians, learnt was that they were not. Or rather, that it depended on individual commanders. While we were dying, UN officials held endless meetings, gave promises, expressed shock and disbelief – but did nothing to stop the crimes.
UN peacekeeping missions have long been mired in controversy, wherever they have been deployed. One of the most serious and persistent issues is the sexual exploitation of women.
UN peacekeepers are armed forces drawn from different countries and are required to follow the policies of their respective states. Often, they know little to nothing about the people or places where they are deployed.
At the same time, they are instructed not to interfere with locals – a setup that creates, as conflict scholar Severine Autesserre writes in her book Peaceland, “a pervasive power disparity between the interveners and their intended beneficiaries”. Moreover, peacekeeping deployments are costly, and the funds rarely reach local communities.
In Sarajevo, another “safe area” during the 1990s, UN soldiers from Unprofor were a constant presence – white tanks, blue helmets, full protection gear.
Armed, well-fed, and with enough water not only to drink but also to shower – a luxury for us – they were visible on the streets. Usually, we would see them driving around or standing aside, watching us run for our lives – or be killed.
At one point, they began placing improvised barricades around the city to serve as visual protection against snipers. That seemed to be the maximum they were prepared to do. Each of these containers bore a large black sign: UN – a stark reminder that even when real protection disappears, the UN’s public image endures.
Someone later scrawled “forgiven” in red paint beneath it – a haunting commentary.
Illusion of protection
The role of the UN and its peace forces has remained problematic, and I see no reason to believe the Palestinian case will be any different.
Deploying UN peacekeepers implies a false symmetry – that two sides are at war and must be kept apart.
It ignores decades of settler-colonialism, apartheid, land theft, incarceration, violence, and systematic human rights violations. Rather than addressing these widespread abuses, it covers them with a blue lid.
There are other proposals, such as the use of private security – an even worse and less accountable option, as seen in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Deploying UN peacekeepers implies a false symmetry – that two sides are at war and must be kept apart.
The genocide of Palestinians, ongoing for decades and now at its most extreme, demands different solutions.
And if we look to the recent past, we must admit that the international community has yet to find any. So far, every external intervention has brought more misery for local people – and more profit for those who intervene.
Real solutions require a new way of looking at conflict and militarisation, grounded in the lessons of the past, including the Bosnian experience. More importantly, they must come from survivors themselves, based on their own knowledge and lived reality.
But no solution is possible without taking the first step: a total ceasefire. Until that happens, discussions about peacekeepers or similar proposals are a distraction – a way of prolonging the violence, rather than stopping it.
And they will serve to further extend the permission granted by the West to Israel to kill.
On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, let us remember: peace comes with freedom, not the UN.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
