Lawsuit against UN for Bosnia failures

French lawyer sues UN for Srebrenica massacre

TOULOUSE, France, Nov 18 2004 (AFP) - Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre were set to file a suit in a French court Thursday demanding financial compensation from the United Nations for "abandoning" the Muslim enclave of Bosnia.

The case will be filed with an administrative court in Paris by the group's Toulouse-based lawyer Agnes Casero who told AFP that she was representing 329 Srebrenica survivors.

Up to 8,000 Muslim males were killed in the Srebrenica slaughter, the worst in Europe since World War II. In mid-October the Bosnian Serb government issued a report on Srebrenica, admitting the scale of the crime for the first time since it occurred.

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Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic, both charged by the UN court for war crimes and genocide in Srebrenica, still remain at large.

A Dutch battalion serving with the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia was tasked to protect Srebrenica Muslims, but failed to do so.

The entire Dutch government resigned in 2002 after a damning official report blamed the country's political and military leaders for giving their peacekeepers an "impossible" mission to protect the enclave.

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"This massacre was committed under the spotlight of the whole world, with the presence of the UN and nothing was done. From this point of view Srebrenica is not a massacre like the others," she said.