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Srebrenica Safe Area: The Word That Was Never Resourced (Cold Files 015)
The United Nations declared Srebrenica a safe area on 16 April 1993. It is worth reading what that sentence actually authorised, because the answer is close to nothing.
Part of the Cold Files series.
Security Council Resolution 819 runs to thirteen operative paragraphs, and their strongest verbs are demands and requests. Paragraph 1 demands that all parties "treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act." Paragraph 4 asks the Secretary-General to increase the UN Protection Force presence there, and states the purpose in the text itself: "with a view to monitoring the humanitarian situation in the safe area."
Monitoring. No paragraph authorises force. No paragraph assigns a soldier. Chapter VII of the Charter is invoked, which is the clause that permits enforcement, but the preamble ties it to the mandate UNPROFOR already held, "and in that context acting under Chapter VII."
Twenty six months later the enclave fell in five days. The shortfall between the word and the means was not found in hindsight. It was specified in advance, in writing, by the United Nations, and the man who ran the operation says the Council understood it.
What the Council authorised, and what it bought
Resolution 824, on 6 May 1993, added Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde and Bihac. Six safe areas in all. The force increment attached to it, in paragraph 6, was fifty additional military observers.
Resolution 836, on 4 June 1993, is the one usually cited as the moment the UN undertook to defend the enclaves. Paragraph 4 does decide "to ensure full respect for the safe areas." Paragraph 5 then sets out what that was to mean, extending the mandate "to that end" to allow UNPROFOR "to deter attacks against the safe areas, to monitor the cease-fire, to promote the withdrawal of military or paramilitary units other than those of the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to occupy some key points on the ground." Deter, monitor, promote, occupy. The word defend appears nowhere in Resolution 836 at all.
Paragraph 9, the force authorisation, is gated twice. UNPROFOR could act "in self-defence, to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, in reply to bombardments against the safe areas by any of the parties or to armed incursion into them..." Self-defence, and in reply. A reactive authority dressed as a protective one.
Ten days later the Secretary-General reported on what the task would cost. Yasushi Akashi, who as Special Representative ran the operation, wrote in 1995 that the report, S/25939 of 14 June 1993, "clearly indicated that 34,000 additional forces would be required in order to ensure full respect for the safe area concept." The light option required 7,600, and Akashi gives its purpose without decoration: "The objective of this option, however, was limited: to provide a basic level of deterrence based on the consent and the cooperation of the parties."
The cheaper option was never represented as able to hold anything against an attacker who declined to cooperate. On 18 June 1993 Resolution 844 authorised reinforcement "to meet the additional force requirements mentioned in paragraph 6 of the report of the Secretary-General," then asked member states to supply the troops. By 1 December 1994 the arithmetic sat in a Council document of its own: report S/1994/1389 recorded that of 34,000 troops requested, only 7,600 were authorised. Seven months before the fall.
And the Council knew. Akashi, in the same article, writes that even the strong option would have given UNPROFOR the muscle "to forcefully deter attacks on, and not to defend, these areas," and that the light option "was selected with the clear understanding that UNPROFOR would be incapable of defending the safe areas."
The strongest case against reading too much into the numbers is made by the men who produced them. Lord Hannay, Britain's permanent representative and one of the men who voted, called such estimates "a joke," designed to be shot down. Nobody, on that account, ever expected 34,000. That is probably right, and it does not help. On Akashi's account the Council did not buy a force it mistakenly thought sufficient. It bought one it understood to be insufficient.
Annan put it in writing in April 1993
The clearest warning is not in any Council document. On 23 April 1993, seven days after Srebrenica was declared a safe area, Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping, wrote to the UNPROFOR Force Commander, Lieutenant General Lars-Eric Wahlgren, about the demilitarisation under way: "UNPROFOR takes on a moral responsibility for the safety of the disarmed that it clearly does not have the military resources to honor beyond a point." It is an internal letter, not a document the Council was obliged to read, and saying so makes it stronger. The official responsible for peacekeeping named the exact failure in the first week.
Wahlgren answered in kind. On 3 June 1993, the day before Resolution 836 was adopted, he cabled Annan with his doubts about implementing the safe areas at all, asked for the mandate to be clarified and resources committed, and closed: "One simply cannot make peace and war at the same time." Both documents were declassified for a 2015 conference at the Hague.
The demilitarisation failed too. The ICTY's trial judgement in the Krstic case records that the Chamber "heard credible and largely uncontested evidence of a consistent refusal by the Bosnian Muslims to abide by the agreement to demilitarise the 'safe area'." It is quoted often by people arguing the enclave forfeited its status. The Chamber heard it in the case that convicted a Bosnian Serb general over Srebrenica.
The order to make life unbearable
In March 1995 the President of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadzic, issued the document the ICTY entered as Exhibit P 425 and the world knows as Directive 7. The Krstic judgement quotes it. The army was to "create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica." The same exhibit instructs state and military organs, "through planned and unobtrusively restrictive issuing of permits," to "reduce and limit the logistics support of UNPROFOR to the enclaves and the supply of material resources to the Muslim population, making them dependent on our good will while at the same time avoiding condemnation by the international community." The strangulation was therefore not an incident. It was a written instruction, and it worked.
Human Rights Watch, reporting in October 1995, found that from late February the Bosnian Serbs held the enclave to one convoy a month for a population of some 39,000, and forbade the convoys from delivering salt. By early July the UN soldiers inside "were completely out of fuel and patrolled regularly on foot," and their anti-tank missiles were useless because Bosnian Serb forces had confiscated vital spare parts. The battalion was shrinking too, because men who went on leave were not let back. The Krstic judgement puts Dutchbat at no more than 600 at any one time, holding thirteen observation posts, and records a drop to 400 by early 1995. Human Rights Watch, measuring in July, says roughly 300.
Before any of it was tested, the UN command had written its priority down. Lieutenant General Rupert Smith's Directive 2/95 of 29 May 1995 records: "I have been directed, today 29 May 1995, that the execution of the mandate is secondary to the security of UN personnel." On 2 June Lieutenant General Bernard Janvier told Smith to "definitely avoid any action which may degenerate into confrontation," while asking him to prepare for one.
The offensive opened at 03:15 on 6 July. Lieutenant Colonel Karremans requested close air support on 8 July and was refused; on the evening of 9 July Janvier's own staff recommended it and he declined. At 14:23 on 11 July four American F-16s finally struck, and destroyed one tank. Human Rights Watch called it "a meager display. Too little, too late."
The courtroom that could not be entered
The institution that declared the safe area was sued over it, and proved untouchable. The Mothers of Srebrenica foundation took the United Nations and the Netherlands jointly to the District Court of The Hague; the UN was dismissed on immunity, and in 2013 the European Court of Human Rights declared inadmissible an application by the foundation and ten relatives arguing that this had denied them access to a court. The immunity, the Dutch Supreme Court had held, "is absolute."
Every apportionment of blame since has landed on a troop contributor rather than on the body that wrote the resolution. In July 2014 the District Court of The Hague found the Netherlands liable for the roughly 350 men inside the compound on 13 July whom Dutchbat helped evacuate, with no discount at all, considering their survival effectively certain had Dutchbat refused. The Court of Appeal replaced that in 2017 with a loss-of-chance assessment and put the chance of survival at 30 per cent. On 19 July 2019 the Supreme Court cut it to 10 per cent, calling the chance "slim, but not negligible." That figure is not a share of the dead or of the blame. It is a probability discount on a civil bill, for 350 men out of some eight thousand killed.
Criminal law reached further. Karadzic and Mladic were both convicted of genocide at Srebrenica and both ended with life, raised in 2019 and affirmed in 2021 by the residual Mechanism that took over after the ICTY closed at the end of 2017. The court outlived itself to finish the job. Mladic died in custody in The Hague on 27 August 2026.
The institution that finished its job
In September and October 1995 Bosnian Serb engineering units went back to the graves. The ICTY's own account states that they "disturbed eight of these primary gravesites in an attempt to cover up their crimes," removing bodies and reburying them elsewhere. The Srebrenica Memorial Centre puts the total of gravesites exhumed in and around the town at 94.
The operation was meant to make the dead uncountable, and in the ordinary sense it worked. The International Commission on Missing Persons describes remains found disarticulated across multiple sites, and in September 2025 put the average at "at least five different mass grave locations often as much as 50 kilometres apart." An ICTY investigator's forensic summary of June 2013 recorded 1,001 DNA connections established between the graves.
What the reburial did not anticipate is that the method which eventually solved it does not reassemble bodies. It matches strangers to families.
ICMP was created in 1996 at the G7 summit in Lyon, on the initiative of President Bill Clinton, to locate the missing of the Yugoslav wars. Its laboratories worked on pulling usable profiles from badly degraded bone and matching them blind against a database built from the blood of relatives. By ICMP's account the first match came in November 2001, a teenage boy from Srebrenica. As of June 2023 relatives had given 22,337 reference samples, and ICMP had identified 6,981 victims by DNA and 7,017 by all methods combined.
The counting still has not settled. Three institutions publish three figures. The Krstic trial chamber found that "the total number is likely to be within the range of 7,000 -8,000 men," which is a finding beyond reasonable doubt rather than an estimate. ICMP says just over 8,000. The Memorial Centre's register carries 8,372 names, a figure the UN General Assembly adopted in May 2024. The number still missing is reported as around 1,000 by ICMP and more than 1,700 by the Memorial Centre, which is a disagreement less about the dead than about who counts as found.
The rate has collapsed to almost nothing. Seven people were buried at Potocari in 2025 and ten in 2026, bringing the total interred there to 6,782. Radislav Krstic, convicted of aiding and abetting the genocide and refused early release again in July 2026, has still not said where the rest of the graves are.
ICMP's director general Kathryne Bomberger said on the thirty first anniversary that the investigations "demonstrated that even the most systematic attempts to conceal mass crimes can be overcome through science, independent institutions, international cooperation, and the rule of law." That is true, and it is worth being exact about which crime was overcome. The concealment was defeated. The killing was not prevented, and the only body that had promised anything about that cannot be taken to court over it.
Thirty one years on, the organisation that declared the safe area has a report explaining the failure. The organisation invented afterwards has 6,782 graves with names on them.
More Cold Files: Vukovar 1991 and Ovcara and Sri Lanka, the endgame.
NEXT IN COLD FILES: Halabja and the Anfal campaign, 1987 to 1988. A chemical attack on a town of civilians, and the Washington paper that blamed the wrong army for it.
Sources consulted
UN Security Council, Resolutions 819, 824, 836 and 844, 1993
UN Secretary-General, S/25939, 1993; S/1994/1389, 1994; A/54/549, 1999
Akashi, Use of Force in a UN Peace-Keeping Operation, Fordham ILJ, 1995
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Srebrenica conference transcripts, 2015
National Security Archive, Briefing Book 519, UN cables, 1993
ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstic, judgements of 2001 and 2004
ICTY, Facts about Srebrenica
IRMCT, case information sheets, Karadzic and Mladic
Human Rights Watch, The Fall of Srebrenica, 1995
ECtHR, Mothers of Srebrenica v. the Netherlands, 2013
Hoge Raad, 2019, and Hague Court of Appeal, 2017
ICMP, Srebrenica pages and anniversary statements, 2012 to 2026
Srebrenica Memorial Centre, mass graves; ICTY and ICMP forensic summary, 2013
Cold Files runs alongside the Daily Sitrep. For the files as they land, and the day's intelligence picture, follow Project Leaflet on t.me/TheLeaflet.
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