Sometimes late is not better than never

You are fighting in a 99.9% Muslim nation. You are well known as a nation that let Christians slaughter thousands of Muslims without firing a shot. It was over 10 years ago.

Think you want to give those military members a high profile award? For. Doing. Nothing. While. Thousands. Of. Muslims. Were. Slaughtered.

If you are the Dutch Army, the answer is yes.

IT SEEMS a provocative, even callous, thing to do. This week the Dutch government awarded medals to soldiers who had failed, in 1995, to prevent a massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, in the midst of the war in Bosnia. On Monday December 4th the Dutch defence minister, Henk Kamp, told a parade of 500 soldiers that they had faced an “extraordinarily difficult task” in being asked to protect Muslims in the UN enclave at Srebrenica. Confronted by Serb attackers, and without air support or diplomatic help from UN allies, the lightly armed Dutch were unable to stop the killings. Mr Kamp suggested that the Dutch battalion “has for years wrongly been held responsible for what happened in the enclave”.

File this under "stupid." Don't you have a good Information Operations staff advisor? "Don't shoot the piano player." Indeed.