Hearings underway in Srebrenica suit against Dutch government News
Hearings underway in Srebrenica suit against Dutch government

[JURIST] Hearings began Thursday in a civil suit filed against the Dutch government by two families of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre [BBC timeline]. The families claim that the Dutch government should be held responsible because of Dutch peacekeepers' inability to stop Serb forces' slaughter of 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys [JURIST report] from the UN-protected eastern Bosnian enclave in Europe's worst mass slaughter of civilians since the end of World War II. The Dutch government has said that the families should seek compensation from Serbia. The Hague District Court is currently holding preliminary hearings to see whether there are sufficient grounds for the civil suit to go to trial. The first witness to testify Thursday, personnel officer Berend Osterveen, said that the Dutch government was unprepared for the massacre and was "frustrated and powerless." AP has more.

THIS DAY @ LAW

UN General Assembly approves Palestine partition plan

The UN General Assembly approved UN Resolution Resolution 181 (II) on November 29, 1947, recommending that the British Mandate for Palestine be split into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone for Jerusalem. The vote in the assembly was 33 for to 13 against, with 10 abstentions. The resolution sparked a war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews in 1947 and a wider war after Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded the new State of Israel in 1948. Read Resolution 181 (II).

UN divided Palestine between Arabs and Jews

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab territories, leading to the establishment of a Jewish state the following year. Read UN General Assembly Resolution 181.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara resigns during Vietnam Conflict

On November 29, 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced that he was resigning from his office to accept an appointment as head of the World Bank. The announcement came as the Vietnam Conflict was becoming increasingly unpopular in the United States and abroad.