Intervention into the official report “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences, and Analyses of the Fall of a ‘Safe Area’” (2002), which was commissioned by the Dutch government.

On page 1599 of the report, just before the actual description of the Srebrenica massacre, the authors quote the following lines from the British poet Francis Quarles:

Judge not the play before the play is done
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.

It appeared that the quotation of the verse was only partial; originally it started with the line “My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on,” which was however omitted in the report. This omission cannot have been anything but a conscious choice on the side of the authors, because it too clearly states the truth of the Dutch UNPROFOR mission to Srebrenica: its role as “patient looker-on” while thousands were massacred. Completing the verse thus became an attempt to display the hidden condition underlying the 3800-page report — the patience of both the failed UNPROFOR mission and the report’s authors –, by the addition of a single line.