U.S. general apologises for Dutch gay soldier remark

By Ben Berkowitz

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A retired U.S. general has apologised for comments this month linking the defeat of Dutch troops by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995 to the presence of openly gay soldiers in the Dutch military.

On March 18, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander John Sheehan told a U.S. congressional hearing that European armies had been weakened by efforts to "socialise" them, including allowing gay soldiers to serve.

He specifically cited the example of Srebrenica, where Serb paramilitaries overran lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers before slaughtering over 7,000 Muslim men and boys. It was Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, and a six-year investigation into the attack led to the fall of the Dutch government in 2002.

Sheehan said he had been told by a Dutch military commander that the Dutch felt the presence of gay soldiers was one of the reasons the peacekeepers were so easily defeated.

But in a letter on Monday to that commander, retired general Henk van den Bremmen, Sheehan acknowledged that Van den Bremmen had said no such thing at the time.

"I am sorry that my recent public recollection of those discussions of 15 years ago inaccurately reflected your thinking on some specific social issues in the military," Sheehan said in the letter. "To be clear, the failure on the ground in Srebrenica was in no way the fault of the individual soldiers."

The Dutch Defence Ministry provided Reuters with a copy of the letter, which it said it had "absolutely" confirmed was written and sent by Sheehan to Van den Breemen.

Sheehan's comments caused a storm of controversy in the Netherlands, which in some ways is still scarred by the memory of events during the Bosnian conflict.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said his comments were "beneath contempt", the Defence Ministry called them "absolute nonsense" and the head of the gay soldiers' group SHK called them "the ridiculous convulsion of a loner".

Another group, calling itself the Pink Army, began soliciting donations and potential plaintiffs as it contemplated a defamation lawsuit against Sheehan in the United States. The group said it would drop those plans following the apology.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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