Commentary / PERSPECTIVE ON INTERVENTION :...

Genocide, according to the widely ratified convention declaring it a crime, means killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm or deliberately inflicting on an ethnic or religious group conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part and “committed with intent to destroy it, in whole or in part.” By the terms of that standard definition, genocide is being done in Bosnia. Indeed it is largely complete.

Soon, the good-natured mediators, the prudent generals and realistic leaders of the West can turn their attention to other matters. For the once-thriving Muslim community will then have taken its place in that lugubrious sector of collective memory reserved for total losers, peoples who, when they have ceased to clutter the agenda of statecraft with their exigent shrieks, are poignantly memorialized as the victims of holocausts.

But first the official keepers of the Western conscience have final rites to perform. The Bosnian Muslims must not be allowed to die as they lived, irresponsibly. And surely it was irresponsible to assume that the omnipotent legions of the West, the makers of Desert Storm, would save them from extinction. But if they will, as a final act of atonement for weakness and delusion, confirm the division of their estate between Serbs and Croats, and thus contribute to peace and good order in the Balkans, then, despite their sins, they will be granted a little monument, perhaps a block in Sarajevo, where caretakers can maintain a reliquary. So in future years, during the tourism months, survivors of the diaspora can return, comb through the preserved bits of hair and bone, the shards of homes and the photos of streets, and remember that once, before they became pathetic refugees, they were a people.

Looking back on this time, even those who are blind to crime will at least acknowledge that there was a blunder.