Het Srebrenica-rapport en de geschiedenis van het heden

Abstract

The Srebrenica report and the history of present times, P. Lagrou
The Srebrenica report, compiled by the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, is an unprecedented venture into genuinely contemporary history. The enquiry started one year after the massacre in July 1995 and the report was published less than six years later. The Dutch government granted the team of researchers exceptional access to public archives, but the investigation also benefited from the ongoing proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The report produced spectacular political results, culminating in the resignation of the Dutch government, but its implications for the debate on the chronological limits of the exercise of history as a scientific discipline will be longer lasting. Is the self-imposed limit, whereby historians only concern themselves with things past, that are at least a few decades old, merely circumstantial, due to the inaccessibility of the sources, and thus destined to disappear when the rules of access are changed or are they a fundamental condition of the historian's method?

The report can be credited with impressive achievements in the reconstruction of the massacre through a thorough combination of very diverse source materials. It also raises fundamental questions in that it shows that a national approach is no longer sufficient to analyse the complex functioning of European politics at the close of the twentieth century. However, the most important objection one can level against the report's approach is that the fundamental problem of exclusive access granted to one specific research team, yet unavailable to contradictory investigations, was considerably aggravated by the redactional choice of a streamlined end-result that does not accommodate dissenting opinions or internal debate.

This review is part of the discussion forum 'Srebrenica, een "veilig" gebied' (J. C. H. Blom, B. G J. de Graaff, D. C. L. Schoonoord).