Pieter Boering, witness at the Ratko Mladic trial

In the cross-examination of Lieutenant Colonel Pieter Boering, Ratko Mladic’s defense counsel suggested that the Dutch Battalion soldiers had actively participated in putting the civilians onto buses in Potocari. Boering was the liaison officer in the Dutch Battalion and he attended the meetings between his commander Karremans and Mladic in the Fontana Hotel in Bratunac on 11 and 12 July 1995.

Invoking the witness’s statement to the Dutch authorities given on his return from Srebrenica, the defense counsel put it to Boering that he had ‘deployed military observers’ in Potocari, that ‘people with straps let the people through’, and that the ‘blue helmets’ helped ‘divide up the people, sending men to the white house’. Lieutenant Colonel Boering said that the UN military observers were stationed near a building in order to be able to see where the men who had been removed from the rest of the refugees were taken. Boering said that he ordered the observers to ‘monitor’ how many Bosnian Muslims were taken away. The witness confirmed that he saw ‘a strap’ but didn’t remember who ‘tried’ to control the people, whether those were the military observers or the Dutch soldiers. The witness also claimed he ‘didn’t see’ UNPROFOR soldiers send men to the ‘white house’.

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