Dutch government partly to blame for the 300 Muslims killed in the Srebrenica massacre

A court has found the Netherlands is in part to blame for the deaths of hundreds of Muslim men in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

An appeals court in the Hague upheld a judgement from 2014 that ordered the Dutch government to compensate families of the Bosniak Muslims who were handed to Bosnian Serb troops by Dutch UN peacekeepers.

The court said the peacekeepers knew the men seeking refuge at a UN base in the village of Potocari would be killed.

Judge Gepke Dulek said the victims were "deprived of the chance of survival".

The case is unique as the UN normally has immunity from prosecution and this is a rare case of UN peacekeepers being held to account over their actions.

The Srebrenica massacre was the worst on European soil since the Second World War, in which more than 8,000 Muslims were murdered in the small mountain town.

War broke out in Bosnia in April 1992 after months of growing tension between Serbs, Bosnians and Croats. Bosnian Serbs, under Radovan Karadzic, laid siege to Sarajevo and began the widespread ethnic cleansing of non-Serbian inhabitants in eastern Bosnia.

In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces took hold of Srebrenica, designated a UN "safe area" just two years before. Bosnian Muslim men and boys were rounded up for execution. Women were raped, tortured and forcibly displaced from their homes.

A survivor, Adisada Dudic, told IBTimes UK more than 50 members of her family were killed in the massacre. Dudic fled Srebrenica with her family, but her father stayed behind.

"My father loaded my pregnant mother, myself and my sisters on to trucks for women and children," she said. "He stayed behind in Srebrenica but we were to go as far away as possible. We travelled for nine days – mostly at night – until we reached a refugee camp in Ljubljana, Slovenia."

"We lost over 50 members of our family in July 1995. One of our uncles spent three months in the woodland, hiding and eating what he could find. I remember women and children on buses being deported from the area and they were completely traumatised. These are the kinds of images that stay in my head always."