



Dutch officials have reacted with anger and bemusement to the claim by a retired American general that their nation’s soldiers failed to prevent the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 in part because the presence of gay troops in the Dutch military had depleted the force’s morale.

On Thursday in Washington, John Sheehan, a former Marine general, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was against allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the American military, in part because of what he said was the example of European armed forces that had been changed “to reflect societies that they are theoretically paid to protect.” General Sheehan said that after the Dutch military allowed troops to be represented by unions and accepted “open homosexuality,” its fighting spirit was weakened. The retired general said:

That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war. The case in point that I’m referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs. The battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II.

Asked by Carl Levin, the committee’s chairman, if Dutch military officials had told him that Srebrenica was allowed to fall “because there were gay soldiers there,” General Sheehan said: “Yes. They included that as part of the problem.”

As my colleague David Rohde has documented in his book, “Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica,” the small force of 450 lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers tasked with defending the enclave by the United Nations was simply not equipped to repel the invading Bosnian Serb Army. When the Serb commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, led an attack on Srebrenica in July 1995, the Dutch repeatedly requested that their NATO colleagues use airstrikes to keep that force at bay. That close air support failed to come in time to prevent the Serbs from taking control of the town and eventually killing more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys.

Mr. Rohde explained that when the United Nations voted to declare Srebrenica and five other Bosnian towns “safe areas” in 1993, the United States and other countries that supported the resolution failed to agree to send enough troops to police the towns. The United Nations estimated that it would take a force of 34,000 soldiers to protect the civilian populations of Srebrenica and the other towns that were completely surrounded by Bosnian Serb positions. Only 7,600 troops were divided among the six towns.

Dutch television reported that when he was pressed to name a source in the Dutch military, General Sheehan said that he was basing his remarks on what someone named “Hankman Berman” had told him. The Dutch Defense Ministry guessed that this was a reference to Gen. Henk van den Breemen, the country’s former chief of defense staff. On Friday the ministry issued a statement saying that General van den Breemen, now retired, called this “absolute nonsense,” since he did not believe that the presence of gay troops had anything to do with what happened at Srebrenica and had never said any such thing.

Soon after the hearing, the Dutch ambassador to the United States, Renée Jones-Bos, said that she “couldn’t disagree more,” in a statement posted on her embassy’s Web site. The ambassador added:

The military mission of Dutch U.N. soldiers at Srebrenica has been exhaustively studied and evaluated, nationally and internationally. There is nothing in these reports that suggests any relationship between gays serving in the military and the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims.

On Friday, Dutch radio noted that “among all the introspection and adjustments made in the wake of Srebrenica, the issue of homosexuality never came up.”

The Dutch defense minister, Eimert van Middelkoop, added that the comments were, “scandalous and unbefitting a soldier.” Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister, chimed in on Twitter, calling the explanation of what happened at Srebrenica “extremely strange.” Jan Kleian, the head of the Dutch military union ACOM, told Dutch television, “That man is just crazy.” He added, “That sounds harsh, but what else can I say, because it is complete nonsense.”

According to Radio Netherlands:

Gays have been allowed to serve in the Dutch army since 1974. Before that, there were gays in the military under a version of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Today, about 7 to 10 percent of the soldiers serving in the Dutch military are homosexual.

It is unclear if General Sheehan’s comments will carry much weight with the Senate committee. Before and after he left the military, the former Marine general had a history of making what might be called intemperate remarks on a range of subjects. In the 1980s General Sheehan’s complaints about plans by the Army that seemed to him to be akin to “building another Marine Corps” led to a Congressional hearing. In 2007, when he turned down an offer to oversee the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he told The Washington Post, “Rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks.'”

As Politico reported, in an appearance before the same Senate committee this week on a different matter, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the United States Central Command, refused to be drawn into making a simple statement either for or against the idea of changing the current policy on gays in the American military. General Petraeus, said “This is not a sound-bite issue,” and asked if he could have eight minutes to read a prepared statement with his thoughts on the policy. Since the committee only offered the general six minutes, and he declined to speed-read his statement, his full views are not yet part of the public record, but he did tell the committee, “I believe the time has come to consider a change to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.'”