A Matter of Conscience--as Well as Policy : Security Council warns Serbia about detention camps

“There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than 10 yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting.”

The year was 1944. The writer was Arthur Koestler. His essay’s title was “On Disbelieving Atrocities.” Koestler was writing because even at that late date many refused to believe that the Nazi death camps existed. Those bringing back tales of horror, the skeptics said, had an ax to grind. There was something wrong with them.

Koestler countered: “Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. . . . But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: Perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts.”

Are there death camps in Bosnia, run by Serbs determined to “cleanse” the territory they claim of Muslims and Croats? Judenrein. That was the unspeakably hideous word the Nazis used: “cleansed of Jews.” The U.N. Security Council on Tuesday demanded that detention camps operated by all factions be opened to neutral international agencies.

We do not know all the details. But even before the most recent, sickening reports reached the world, there was abundant cause for the relevant international bodies to consider--and urgently--military action against Serbia.

Another Vietnam? Those who peopled Koestler’s dream, who stand at the intersection 10 yards distant, laughing and chatting, would like to end the debate with the one word Vietnam. But it would be culpable blindness to claim that the United States’ only options are a 20-year guerrilla war and utter inaction.

The Gulf War coalition’s ground troops did not wage war on Iraq as such. Pursuit of the retreating Iraqis did not carry the allied ground forces even as far north as the southern city of Basra. And yet, in March, 1991, U.N. inspectors could write of the damage done by air strikes alone: “Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on intensive use of energy and technology.”

Perhaps NATO should send a copy of that report to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, accompanied by a list of infrastructure targets and a tentative calendar of attack dates. Saddam Hussein has been compared to Hitler for his treatment of the Kurds. Milosevic deserves the comparison, from everything we now know, at least as much for his treatment of the Croats and, most of all, of the Muslims. We do not propose unilateral U.S. action. But the Bush Administration should recognize that this nation has, in this transitional period, a morally inescapable leadership role to play. The moment calls for courage--and for speed.