Some questions about movie and real war

Not bunker and probably not grenade.

The Dutch gvt report (http://srebrenica.brightside.nl/srebrenica/):

The Attack on OP-F and the Death of Raviv van Renssen

The centre of the battle on 8 July was still located in the south-eastern corner of the enclave at OP-F. By midday, VRS tanks were firing at ABiH positions approximately two-hundred metres from OP-F. That resulted in a heavy exchange of fire between the ABiH and the VRS; not only at OP-F, but also at the nearby posts of OP-U and OP-S.

Shortly prior to the start of the actual attack on OP-F, the OP sergeant in command, Sergeant Van Rossum, discussed an evacuation plan with the personnel of the OP. A sketch had been drawn of the route that was to be used as a retreat by the APC in the case of an emergency.

The exchange between the ABiH and VRS started soon thereafter in the vicinity of the OP. Various explosions a few hundred metres from OP-F terrorised the crew of that OP. The OP Commander, Sergeant van Rossum, then reported to the Battalion Command (Franken) that he wished to evacuate the OP; however, the OP was under fire and they were faced with the problem of safely reaching the APC. They did not receive permission to evacuate the OP. Franken would not agree to the advice of the Company Commander, Captain Groen, to allow the OP crew to withdraw towards the location of the VRS soldiers. A witness to that conversation heard Franken say on the radio; ‘You know how I feel about that. I do not want to discuss it any further.’ The unit was informed that they were not permitted to evacuate the OP ‘under any circumstances’. Consequently, the Company Commander, Captain Groen, also refused permission to withdraw in the direction of the VRS lines. The battalion staff did however send another message to the OP crew, namely; ‘Try to give the Serbs hell’; which attested to a general lack of understanding of the situation. The final decision was to remain in the OPs and to allow the VRS to advance.

A VRS tank subsequently broke through the ABiH lines and approached to within a hundred metres of the OP. The VRS additionally opened fire with an M-46 130mm Field Gun at ABiH positions nearby. UNMOs then determined that the VRS was making preparations to attack the OP. Two tanks were used to blow a hole in the defence wall of the OP to allow VRS soldiers to force their way inside, and a VRS tank, positioned a hundred metres away, kept its barrel aimed at the OP and the withdrawal route. One of the crew wrote the following about the situation: ‘At that point everyone panicked. There was no way we could escape’. To top it all, Franken, at some point instructed Groen to the effect that OP-F should fire a TOW anti-tank missile to eliminate the tank. The Battalion Commander also instructed them to take the AT-4 anti-tank weapons with them in case of demolition of the OP. At that point the VRS soldiers approached the OP from the surrounding bush. Waving white flags, they attempted to establish contact with the OP crew. Initially they would not approach the OP as a result of which it was impossible to establish contact. The VRS then tried to get the OP Commander, Van Rossum, to meet them at a house located a hundred metres in front of the OP, but Van Rossum refused. After that two VRS soldiers approached the OP and, after an exchange of gestures, more followed. The soldiers were in a festive mood, for the simple reason that they intended to take over OP-F.

The VRS was prepared to let the OP crew go once they had surrendered all weapons and flack jackets. After some negotiation Dutchbat was allowed to keep their flack jackets. The VRS then demanded the crew’s departure within ten minutes. The VRS did indeed let them go by APC without further problems. Karremans notified Nicolai in Sarajevo and Brantz in Tuzla that the VRS had taken OP-F.[4] The assault on and occupation of the OP played out in a matter of approximately one hour. This put the VRS inside the borders of the enclave for a second time - this time in control of an OP.

The APC left the OP-F at high speed, but soon slowed down and eventually came to a halt approximately 200 metres further.[5] At the foot of the hill ABiH soldiers were putting together a barricade to stop the APC. This was the second time the ABiH had witnessed a take-over of an OP by the VRS. It meant that, after the occupation of OP-E, more than a month earlier, another piece of the enclave was under threat of being nibbled away by the Bosnian Serbs. The ABiH wanted to prevent that, which is why they endeavoured to stop Dutchbat from beating the retreat. The crew of the APC feared that the ABiH was planning to use them as a shield against the Bosnian Serbs; which, understandably, motivated them all the more to retreat as soon as possible. Having established that no anti-tank weapons were aimed at the APC and after obtaining permission from the command post (in military terms: the Ops Room) of B Company, the APC broke through the barricade while the occupants under the command of the APC commander took shelter behind the armour plating. Soldier Van Renssen, who was slow in taking cover because of his length, was hit by pellets of a shotgun fired by an ABiH soldier – others, however, mentioned a handgrenade – of which small metal parts entered his skull beneath the rim of helmet.[6]

Van Renssen collapsed inside the vehicle. A crew member wrote the following passages: ‘Once again everyone panicked and everyone tried to help him – he had a large wound behind his left ear. The emergency bandage we applied was almost immediately saturated with blood.’ A hastily summoned armoured casualty evacuation vehicle raced Van Renssen to the sickbay at the compound in Potocari: In spite of heart-massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by two medics, while a third applied a drip and administered atropine , Van Renssen died.[7] His remains were sent to the Netherlands and arrived there the following day. The negotiations to move his body from the enclave, and the medical treatment Van Renssen received at the compound in Potocari, are covered in more detail in the Appendix, ‘Dutchbat and the local population: medical issues.’

Van Renssen was the 67th victim to be mourned by UNPROFOR. Karremans wrote the following in his book: ‘Once again time stood still. Victim to a war that is not our own.’[8] In those words Karremans also expressed the consequences of Van Renssen’s death for the battalion; morale, which had not been high for various reasons, now fell to new lows. Dutchbat increasingly fell victim to a gnawing sense of doubt in the value of their continued presence. They were hostages in the enclave and there was no visible end to their sojourn. Worse still, in the days to come things would only take a more dramatic turn.

A Closer Look at the Assault on OP-F and the Death of Raviv van Renssen

The events surrounding OP-F led to action in a number of places in the UN hierarchy. In Tuzla, Brantz wrote to the Commander of the 2nd Corps of the ABiH, General Sead Delic, that if the ABiH were going to treat UNPROFOR as an enemy, as had happened at OP-F, this simply illustrated the kind of problems facing UNPROFOR. Brantz also asked for an investigation into the ABiH soldier responsible for Van Renssen’s death.[9] That was followed by a meeting with the 2nd Corps. It was only at that point that Brantz learnt that the real reason for the pullback from OP-F had been a deliberate attack by the VRS. After that meeting, the ABiH in Tuzla sent an order to the 28th Division to do everything in their power to get the body of the late Van Renssen out according to the wishes of the Dutchbat commander,[10] even though that was really an issue for the VRS.

After Brantz’ request to the ABiH for an investigation, the 2nd Corps ordered the Commander of the 28th Division, Ramiz Becirovic, to investigate the circumstances of the wounding of Van Renssen and to issue a written report.[11] The Commander of the 282nd Brigade of the ABiH, Major Ibro Dudic, thereupon declared that he had conducted an interview with the ABiH soldiers in the direct vicinity of the APC. According to them, Van Renssen had not been wounded by the ABiH, but by a grenade launched at the APC by the VRS.[12] A witness of the attack on Van Renssen, VRS Colonel Vukota Vukovic, attributed responsibility for the events to an ABiH rifleman.[13] Inhabitants of the enclave also ultimately assigned blame to a Bosnian Muslim rifleman, one Alija hailing from Glogova.[14]

People were standing or sitting on anything mobile.[2] An old man on a stretcher was carried into the APC and an old woman was helped inside. Many people were riding on the APC.[3] Some had to be left behind as well, even though Dutchbat tried to take as many people as possible. People left each other behind and were hanging on to the vehicles. There were people on the front of the APC that fell off the vehicle and were probably run over.[4] Part IV will come back to the later investigation in the Netherlands on incidents of people being run over.

(...)

It turned out that everything could get even worse. The APC was past Milacevici. Mulder, who drove, sat in the APC with the signaller and the gunner. Two soldiers walked behind the APC and one walked in front. The trip was not progressing and Mulder was afraid all the refugees would cut him off from the compound, there was also the threat of running out of fuel: it was driving, stopping, driving, and stopping. Mulder tried to lead the procession with the APC. He had been ordered to keep the people behind the APC. He stopped occasionally to climb on top of the APC to show that they were still there: ‘if we stood still, everybody stood still.’ However, the APC was not able to stay out front because more and more people joined the procession along the way. Therefore, there were gradually many refugees in front of the APC too.

At this stage of the trip, a steep wall ran along the right side of the road and there was water with a steep slope behind that on the left. Mulder was just standing on top of the APC again to reassure the people when shots were fired from the north with a .50 machinegun. Refugees fell from the APC; Mulder was unable to judge whether that was due to the scare or because they were hit. A huge panic arose. Mulder called his personnel inside, turned on the APC’s lights and sounded the horn. When the road was reasonably clear, Mulder started to drive while honking the horn over a distance of approximately 300 metres. He drove fast to escape the fire, which, according to him, was aimed at the APC and this presented danger to the refugees as well. However, people were still walking in front of the APC at that point. They had nowhere to go on the narrow road and the APC drove faster through here than the refugees could walk.

Mulder felt as if he was driving right over people. When the APC stopped, he reported via the radio that he had possibly hit people with the APC during the move. Upon arrival at the road between Potocari and Srebrenica, Mulder reported to Captain Groen who maintained the blocking position there. He ordered him to continue driving directly to Potocari, where refugees had also arrived in the meantime. Ultimately, between 3,000 and 4,000 people arrived in Potocari with the group from OP-M, including quite a few able-bodied boys between the age of 16 and 17, according to Mulder. The wounded were dropped off at the sickbay, and then the British JCOs received Mulder with a cup of tea.[1]

(...)

A number of drivers and soldiers escorting the trucks who took their human cargo to Potocari, already had a definite impression along the way that people fell from the trucks and ended up under the wheels or were run over by following trucks, or that they themselves hit people who fell off trucks ahead of them. Shocked and deeply disturbed they told colleagues about their experiences even when they first arrived at the compound. Members of the KHO team who left the enclave on July 15 as the first to be allowed to do so, were debriefed following their arrival in Zagreb and already then told the team of psychologists as well as general Couzy who was also present about the stories regarding the possibility of people being hit by the Dutchbat trucks.[4]

Later suggestions of Dutchbat personnel deliberately keeping quiet about this subject were incorrect. The stories became public knowledge very quickly. On July 22, emotional Dutchbat soldiers in Zagreb openly talked to journalists about the events. A journalist of Het Parool (Dutch daily newspaper), for instance, recorded the experiences of corporal D. Pijfers with a truck full of refugees on the journey to Potocari: ‘Perhaps there were 80 people on the truck, you just don’t believe it when you see that truck. They were hanging from it, they were on it, under it. Two small boys were lying on the batteries. There were people who got under the wheels, but I couldn’t stop, I had to keep going’.[5]

The really major publicity on this subject came a month and a half later. Appearing on the television programme Zembla on 6 September 1995, Sergeant W. Reussing said: ‘we have made it clear in Zagreb, in writing, that people fell under the wheels of our truck and that we simply ran over them and killed them’. Reussing, whose willingness to speak in all candour cannot be faulted, also said in the same Zembla programme that as far as he was concerned ‘everything can be out in the open’.[6] However, Zembla producer R. van den Hout said the Ministry of Defence had known about this for nearly two months but did not wish to comment as long as its own major debriefing investigation was still in progress.