A Rottenness at Europe’s Core : Will no one act to save Bosnia’s Muslims?

If, anywhere in the world, an assault upon the Jews comparable in its genocidal intent to the Nazi death camps were under way, there is one country that would not stand idly by. That country, obviously, is Israel. Against whatever the odds would be, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would take some action, and volunteers would not be wanting in world Jewry. Nor would the claim be advanced, even by those who did stand by, that anti-Semitic wars, like all religious wars, are essentially interminable, a quagmire into which the clear-eyed guardians of national interest know better than to step.

CLOSED DOORS: The Muslims of Bosnia, to their sorrow, have no Israel to come to their rescue. Their European neighbors have not come to their military rescue. Worse, in what may be the grimmest of all echoes of the shoah (to use the Hebrew word that is increasingly replacing Holocaust) , most have all but closed their doors to refugees. The Bosnians’ Muslim brethren talk grandly of military assistance, but they too do nothing to assist the refugees. The United Nations, in the grandest rationalization of all, says that would-be refugees should stay where they are and die because if the United Nations were to help them leave, Serbia’s grand plan of “ethnic cleansing” would be just that much closer to accomplishment.

The Warsaw Ghetto was not saved by the Jews who failed to escape it. Bosnia will not be saved by the Muslims who are about to die in Serbia’s final solution of its Muslim problem. Bosanski Brod, the last Croatian-Muslim-held town in northern Bosnia, has fallen. Krajina (the territory previously wrested from Croatian control), northern Bosnia and Serbia proper now form a contiguous territory. Sarajevo is about to fall. And winter is coming on.

Sarajevo, which once hosted the winter Olympics, is a mountain town where, in an average year, the snow lies yards deep. The commander of the United Nation’s ill-named peacekeeping force estimates that 400,000 Bosnians could starve or freeze to death in the coming months.

CLOSED HEARTS: What a triumph for Realpolitik ! Americans are not wrong to criticize the moral truancy of the Bush Administration, but the larger failure is surely that of the Europeans. Empty gesture has followed empty gesture in a parade whose bitterly clear intent has been to avoid responsibility.

The U.N. Security Council recently declared Bosnia a “no-fly” zone but, in deference to French and British wishes, declined to impose any sanction on violators of the declaration. The Serbs may bomb at will: No plane, no missile will inconvenience them. The gesture is utterly, cruelly meaningless.

NATO has the means to deny Serbia food and power, to attack the artillery surrounding Sarajevo with the same impunity with which that artillery now attacks the city, to destroy munitions dumps, to demonstratively put Belgrade television out of commission.

The means are not lacking. What is lacking is courage and the will to lead. What is hideously on display is a political rottenness at the European core.