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2 June 2005: symposium ‘UN Peacekeeping Operations now and in future’

In the main Academy building of the University of Leiden, Rapenburg 73, the Netherlands, in commemoration of Prof. Mr. B.M. Telders in International Law, who died on 6 April 1945 in concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

Main speaker: P.C. Cammaert, major general of the marines, division commander UN Peacekeeping Force in the Eastern Part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC).

ICHI-chairman Caspar ten Dam visited this symposium, and made ICHI known among the speakers and the public during the break and the discussion period after the break. He personally thanked general Cammaert for his forceful approach and his maximal use of the strengthened UN mandate and of his 16,700 troops to curtail and disarm the local militias by force if necessary.

Especially since Cammaert’s appointment in March 2005 the number of atrocities by the militias in Eastern Congo has decreased dramatically; roughly half of all these irregular forces have handed in their weapons as well.

However, general Cammaert did warn during his speech that the demobilisation, demilitarisation en reorientation programmes will fail if these were not shored up by longer term planning, financing and implementation.

Otherwise the more than 12,000 former child soldiers and other former fighters will take up their weapons again so as to secure their livelihood, and to regain a certain ‘stature’ through intimidation and violence against the local civilian population.

April 2005: article ‘Mercenaries: Deploy or Avoid?’

This committee is of the opinion, as indicated in our basic and goal declarations, that under different circumstances different kinds of humanitarian intervention are possible and necessary.

Different actors may take the initiative and the lead: the United Nations or other international organisations, NATO or other security organisations, one or more states in a ‘coalition of the willing’, or one or more non-state organisations made up of volunteers, rebels or mercenaries.

Combinations of these actors are conceivable – and have occurred in practice – who may operate jointly and simultaneously or relieve each other before, during and after an intervention.

Here we focus on the most controversial actor within the ‘non-state’ option: mercenaries Employing and deploying mercenaries and private military companies (PMC’s) like Executive Outcomes (EO) and Sandline International (which apparently ceased to be active since April 2004) can be risky given their commercial motives and often dubious backgrounds.

On the other hand: these ‘private militaries’ have saved many lives. Thus PMC’s like EO have played stabilising roles in armed conflicts like those in Angola and Sierra Leone during the 90s, by defeating or at least temporarily curtailing the often very brutal rebel movements there.

See further DeclICHImercenaries2005.pdf

11 July 2004: speech ‘Srebrenica and the Two Kinds of Courage that Never Came’

Speech held in reserve by Caspar ten Dam, chairman of the Dutch action group Political Commitee ‘Stari Most’ (PCSM), at the 9thcommemoration of the fall of Srebrenica on 11 July 2004 in The Hague, in front of the Dutch Parliament and Ministry of Defence

Note: the enclave of the town of Srebrenica and surroundings the UN designated as a ‘safe area’ in mid 1993, during the height of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. In mid-July 1995 the Bosnian-Serb forces overran the enclave without much opposition from the few hundred strong UN-contingent called ‘Dutchbat’. The Bosnian-Serb (para)militaries under general Ratko Mladic (indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal on the former Yugoslavia) massacred at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys during those sweltering summer days, the worst butchery in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

See further Speech11july004forICHI.pdf