At 16:50 20-4-02 -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
> > >I'll give the Dutch government credit on how they are handling this. They
> > >are not dismissing it as readily as the European and American press are.
> > >But, its still very curious that it took so long for an investigation to
> > >report on the problem.
> >
> > Well, it was an awful lot of work. All those people to be interviewed,
> > investigating every incident, digging into the region's history.
>
>But six and a half years?
A little under 5.5 years actually (not 6.5) but admittedly still a long
time. The justification can be found in the Presentation Speech which is
also available at www.srebrenica.nl/en/index.htm:
"Despite the nature and scale of the problems involved with this kind
of research, it has been possible to draw on a remarkable number of
sources. Thanks to the cooperation of, in particular, the Dutch government
and the United Nations, tens of thousands of normally-inaccessible
documents in archives and private collections both at home and abroad could
be consulted during the course of this research. More than nine hundred
individuals of extremely diverse backgrounds and origins were prepared to
be interviewed.
The research took a long time to complete. This was necessary not only
to encompass the enormous quantity of information about the different kinds
of complicated, interwoven processes but also to meet the academic
requirements of depth and precision. The report is extremely extensive too
because this was the only way of fulfilling the original request: to create
a reconstruction of the events that is as accurate and complete as
possible, and to provide an explanatory historical analysis."
>Are you actually arguing that politics didn't have something to do
>with the delay?
Your statement implies that politics deliberately tried to thwart the
process. I have not seen evidence to back that claim, though. Can you
present evidence for it? (I know the military is suspected of a cover-up
operation, but I have not heard something like that about the politicians.)
Jeroen
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