(Image source: Radio Netherlands Worldwide)

BY JING ZHAO

ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN

You're watching multisource world video news analysis from Newsy. 

An appeals court in the Netherlands has ruled the Dutch state was responsible for the deaths of three Bosnian Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Here’s BBC.

Peter Biles: “Srebrenica, July 1995, a so-called UN safe area, but one was overran by Bosnian Serb forces led by  General Ratko Mladic. The Bosnia Muslims thought to have protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers, they were wrong.”

8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when the Bosnian Serb forces overran the safe area in 1995. It's been a long road to justice for Hasan Nuhanovic, whose father and brother died in the attack.

"’It's the first time, I believe, that a state is being held accountable during a peacekeeping operation where things went wrong,’ said Zegveld, Nuhanovic's lawyer.”(TIME)

According to the National Post, the issue is sensitive in the Netherlands...

“…where the government resigned in 2002 after a report concluded it had sent Dutch troops on a ‘mission impossible.’ Faced with several lawsuits in recent years over the massacre, the government has insisted its troops were abandoned by the United Nations, which provided no air support.”

But the ruling only places the blame on the Dutch government for the deaths of three Muslim men who left the safe area. But as Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports-- the decision could have far reaching implications.

“Firstly, this means that other surviving relatives of the Srebrenica genocide … can demand compensation from the Dutch State. Secondly, it could have wider implications for UN peacekeeping missions because this case has demonstrated that it is possible to hold the sending state responsible...”

But the author of an opinion piece for Voice of Russia says-- this may seem like justice, but it’s really just a blame game.

“...some people in the West try to depict it as if it is the Serbs and only the Serbs who are to blame for all... it looks like the Dutch judges, accusing their own countrymen of war crimes, are only acting on someone’s orders, trying to say once again, though between the lines, that it is the Serbs who are to blame for the bloodshed of the 1990s.”

The ruling is a reversal of previous Dutch court verdicts, which have sided with claims that the Dutch state was not responsible because its troops were operating under a UN mandate.

Transcript by Newsy.