Groups Urge Bush to Act on Bosnia : Protest: Serbian-run prison camps could become another Auschwitz without intervention, says head of Wiesenthal Center. More than 800 sign center’s call for action.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies launched a letter-writing campaign Sunday demanding that President Bush threaten to use military force unless “gross violations of human rights” are ended in Serbian-run prison camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“The emaciated bodies, the skeletal figures you see on television are hard to take for anyone who knows the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the center on Los Angeles’ Westside. “This is an event that if left unchecked has the potential to become another Auschwitz.”

More than 800 people, including Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, went to the center on West Pico Boulevard to sign letters telling Bush that “these atrocities must stop.”

The campaign comes in response to allegations that Serbians are torturing and murdering Bosnian and Croatian prisoners of war in the camps. Serbian leaders have denied the accusations. But images of gaunt prisoners and personal accounts of terror filtering out of the former Yugoslavian republic are sparking a growing public outcry.

Also on Sunday, Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups rallied outside the Federal Building in Westwood to call for U.S. leadership in stopping the alleged abuses.

About 200 protesters carried flags of the breakaway Yugoslavian republics, picket signs and banners that read “No Death Camps.” Cars driving along Wilshire Boulevard honked in support.

“It’s painful to read the papers,” said protester Eve Fisher, 34, of Los Angeles. “I feel uncomfortable going on with my day. I have to do something.”

Serbian talk of “ethnic cleansing” and “concentration camps” in Bosnia-Herzegovina compelled Larry Neinstein, his two young sons in tow, to visit the Wiesenthal Center to sign a letter to Bush.

“We need to be involved and not just stand idly by like the U.S. did in 1944 and ‘45,” he said.

Hier said he is not comparing what may be going on in Bosnia to the World War II concentration camps, which resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews. But he said the Serbian-run prisoner camps are a prelude to what could become wholesale extermination of people based on ethnicity.

Bush said Saturday he was pleased that those controlling the camps will allow Red Cross inspections, but Hier cautioned that the inspections could be restricted and that Red Cross reports should not be taken as absolutely accurate.

The Red Cross inspected Auschwitz in 1944, he said, and reported that “besides being a war camp, everything is fine.”