I think it was all totally political and not the fault of the soldiers on the ground. I worked with the Dutch on numerous occasions in Bosnia and found them to be very proud and diligent soldiers. As stated at the bottom of this extract.
A "small country with a big heart". At least they were there.
Below is an extract from:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/peacekpg/lessons/sreb1.htm
The desperate plight of Dutchbat - the beleaguered, demoralised Dutch soldiers who had the responsibility in July 1995 for implementing the safe havens policy. It describes a crazily conceived international figleaf (liberal interventionism on the cheap) with ludicrous terms of engagement, which amounted to the misplaced belief that the mere presence of a UN force was a sufficient deterrent to the Bosnian Serbs. The air support that might have protected the 8,000 massacred in Srebrenica - which Dutchbat called for - never materialised courtesy of a jittery UN. It was an impossible mission, all now agree; many fond illusions in the international community about a new era of peacekeeping died along with the Bosnian Muslims, and it was largely a matter of chance that it happened on the Dutch watch.
The only possible crime that the Dutch government could be accused of was naivety. They didn't take up the CIA's offer of agents to intercept Bosnian Serb communications and they didn't debrief their Canadian predecessors in Srebrenica, who withdrew, arguing that the policy was unsustainable. But the naivety was evident across the entire Dutch political culture: parliament, the media and the country was swept along by a morally outraged public opinion that Something Must Be Done that allowed no room for a critical examination of what that Something was.
The Dutch were one of the few nations to offer soldiers for the 32,000-strong force first envisaged under the Owen-Vance peace plan; in the end the number barely scraped 6,000. They found themselves propping up a bankrupt international policy not of their devising: the fate, you could argue, as did one contributor to a website debate yesterday, of a "small country with a big heart".